General 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ These, then, are the general ideas with which we must set out in discussing a curriculum:—Life as divided into several kinds of activity of successively decreasing importance; the worth of each order of facts as regulating these several kinds of activity, intrinsically, quasi-intrinsically, and conventionally; and their regulative influences estimated both as knowledge and discipline.
Happily, that all-important part of education which goes to secure direct self-preservation, is in great part already provided for. Too momentous to be left to our blundering, Nature takes it into her own hands. ”

“ Still others, men of advanced education, of approved excellence of judgment, men engaged in professional life, have said, “We concede that education by the means you propose is possible under certain favorable conditions, but we doubt the practicability of attempting by such a means to cover the wide field of general education.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ General training has until recently been so proud of itself that it has not willingly accepted association with courses designed to cultivate skill. The result is that the common man has gained the impression that there is a wide gulf fixed between general education and practical life. One hopeful symptom of the present situation is that discussions of general education are becoming very much more democratic. ”

“ 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 education of the future scholar for manhood will, therefore, as formerly, proceed in general simultaneously with the universal national education, and along with all the others he will attend the instruction it supplies. ”

“ I have enumerated some of the points in which our work is exceptional in the hope of convincing the reader that unusual work carried on successfully in hundreds of schoolrooms—home and other—is based on principles hitherto unrecognized. The recognition of these principles should put our national education on an intelligent basis and should make for general stability, joy in living, and personal initiative. ”

“ For the most fruitful part of all intellectual education is the acquisition of the general outline and the basal idea,—the categories, so to speak, of the provinces of human learning. This intellectual part of school education could not well be more accurately directed to aid the cause of civilization. For the kind of knowledge and mental discipline that conserves civil life is the knowledge that gives an insight into the dependence of the individual upon society. The school is busied with giving the pupil a knowledge of the conditions of physical nature and human nature ”

“ All this will conduce to the practicability and efficacy of education. It will be an education to fit them for an education to be introduced with the progress of that fitness; intellectual culture finding a felicitous adaptation of the soil. We may then adopt with some confidence a public system, or stimulate and assist all independent local exertions for the instruction of the people in the rudiments of literature and general knowledge; and religion too, if you will. ”

“ We are constantly brought back by our discussions of the organization of classes to a consideration of the curriculum. The materials of instruction are capable of advantageous and economical use only when they are adapted to pupils. Our next problem, therefore, is to consider some of the general principles which underlie the organization of the general curriculum and of particular subjects. ”

“ Make every effort to acquire the advanced knowledge of the day, and strain every nerve to carry forward the divine civilization. Establish schools that are well organized, and promote the fundamentals of instruction in the various branches of knowledge through teachers who are pure and sanctified, distinguished for their high standards of conduct and general excellence, and strong in faith; scholars and educators with a thorough knowledge of sciences and arts. ”

“ Mingle with educational men and women, search the educational periodicals and programs, scan the educational books, visit the normal colleges; and I think you will discover that something like this is happening in the educational world: The content of education is being adapted to meet the needs of all the classes and the masses. The method of education is being adapted to the individual. The result is that education is being universalized, socialized, democratized. ”

“ Before any considerable advance can be made either in improving our schools or in causing the attendance upon them to become more general, a good common education—one that shall give us sound minds in sound bodies; one that bestows much attention upon intellectual culture, but more upon the culture of the heart—must come to be ranked among the necessaries of life. ”

“ We live in times critical for everybody but eminently critical for teachers because it rests with them to decide whether personal or general good should be aimed at, whether education shall be merely a means of getting on or a means of general progress towards high thinking and plain living and therefore an instrument of the greatest national good. ”

“ For, despite all differences in conception and efficiency among individual educators, each expresses, more or less perfectly and clearly, the common conception and energy of his age and country. As these rise or fall the general level of the actual educative practice rises or sinks with them. The first essential for successful educative effort is, then, that the community as a whole should have a true estimate of the nature and value of education. ”

“ How to establish the moral aim in the center of the school course, how to subordinate and realize the other educational aims while keeping this chiefly in view, how to make instruction and school discipline contribute unitedly to the formation of vigorous moral character, and how to unite home, school, and other life experiences of a child in perfecting the one great aim of education—these are some of the problems whose solution will be sought in the following chapters. ”

“ All that has been said of the importance of individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity of education. A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the [Pg 202] ”

“ And the assimilation is still proceeding. All the political changes of the age promote it, since they all tend to raise the low and to lower the high. Every extension of education promotes it, because education brings people under common influences, and gives them access to the general stock of facts and sentiments. Improvements in the means of communication promote it, by bringing the inhabitants of distant places into personal contact, and keeping up a rapid flow of changes of residence between one place and another. ”

“ then it follows that if there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilisation in little. ”

“ But to understand business on this plane, and to conduct it in this large way, needs a fine education, an education built, first of all, on a practical basis, such as the education of our common schools. Then should follow a course in the ideals of the race, the classic studies in language, literature, history, science, and philosophy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not a question have I ever heard in any school meeting of the necessity of educating every American child—at any cost. Think of it! Think how far we have come in that respect, in seventy—yes, fifty—years. Universal education has become a settled axiom of our life. ”

“ Education, then, being only for the male children of citizens, and citizenship a degree to be attained to on the basis of education and training, let us next see in what that education consisted, and what were its most prominent characteristics and results. ”

“ The practical tendency of modern education, by which discipline and culture may be given while at the same time preparing the student for the active duties of life, makes education more necessary for all persons and classes. The great changes that have taken place in methods of instruction and in the materials of scientific investigation, and the tendency to develop the man as well as to furnish him with information, evince the masterly progress of educational systems, and demonstrate their great worth. ”

“ If we sum up in one word the most pervading, constant, and obvious characteristic of our schools, and of the teaching and the learning in them to this day, that word must be, immethodical. Although admitting that the education of the young should distinctly embrace the four departments of a training, physical, intellectual, moral, and social, yet, for the sake of clearness in our discussion and its results, not less than through the necessities of a restricted space, we shall here confine our remarks wholly to education in its intellectual aspect. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Elementary education is there of a more practical character than with us; it is our primary instruction, with the omission of the ideal, and the addition of some instruction in commercial and economical affairs ”

“ The provision of education for all, with facilities for children of every class to pass on to higher grades of work, is essential if the latent powers in all, whatever they may be, are to be developed to the utmost. ”

“ Here we find the sole justification of the scanty curricula provided in most of our schools, for the tortuous processes of our teaching, for the mischievous assertion that “it does not matter what a child learns but only how he learns it.” If we teach much and children learn little we comfort ourselves with the idea that we are ‘developing’ this or the other ‘faculty.’ A great future lies before the nation which shall perceive that knowledge is the sole concern of education proper, as distinguished from training, and that knowledge is the necessary daily food of the mind. ”

“ It is a consideration of great importance, that probably there is in no part of the country, or of the world, so great call for the means of education, as in these new States, owing to the vast number's of persons within those ages in which education and instruction are usually received, if received at all. ”

“ And looking attentively at this universal foundation on which our own human value is supported—call it language, logic, law,—we were led to study the relationship existing between individuality, which is the aim of all forms of education, and this universal spirit which here intervenes as it does in every moment of the human life. It intervenes in education, as the science and the conscience and the entire personality of the teacher. ”

“ Thus even if we imagine a perfect educational process, carried out by teachers who are all men and women of light and leading, the result of that process will be ultimately conditioned by the quality of the human beings who pass through it. Just as democracy pre-supposes education, so education pre-supposes children who are educable. ”

“ The education of each class in society has, or ought to have, its ideal, determined by the wants of that class, and by its destination. Society may be imagined so uniform that one education shall be suitable for all its members ”

“ It provided very wisely for the development of elementary education, with the object of "conveying to the great mass of the people, who are utterly incapable of obtaining any education worthy of the name by their own unaided efforts, useful and practical knowledge, suited to every station in life." ”