Graded school

“ Spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and grammar. The farther from the large city, the surer the student is of getting any instruction beyond those branches during the first six or seven years of a common-school course. He may be qualified by home reading to go into the natural sciences or into mathematics at an early age, but that isn’t part of the system. It seldom{415} pleases the teacher of a graded school to be told of such acquirements of a new pupil. ”

“ The establishment of a regular graded course of study, from the lowest primary grades to the college, and close adherence to such course are being felt more and more each year. More than half the graduates of this year began their education in the school, and all interested are proud of them. There is all along a marked difference between those who have come through our own primary schools and others equally capable who have had no systematic early training. ”

“ The discussion suggests, what is undoubtedly the fact, that the so-called academies, high schools, graded schools, even colleges of that time, took in practically everybody who offered. There was no such system of grading as we now look upon as a matter of course. ”

“ This report treats of the training of elementary and secondary teachers, considering first that training which should precede teaching in elementary schools. By elementary schools are meant the primary and grammar departments of graded schools, and ungraded or rural schools.
That teachers are “born, not made,” has been so fully the world’s thought until the present century that a study of subjects, without any study of principles or methods of teaching, has been deemed quite sufficient. ”

“ But why strive for high rank in the college? Why not wait for the more "practical" studies of the professional school? Hundreds of boys the country over declare to-day that it makes little difference whether they win high grades or merely passable grades in the liberal arts, since these courses have no definite bearing on their intended life-work. Almost invariably they are ready to admit that they must settle down to serious effort in the studies of law, medicine, engineering—that is to say, in professional schools. ”

“ This led to the systematizing of instruction and the grading of schools, so that in nearly all the towns of the United States the public schools have been divided into primaries for the younger pupils and grammar-schools for older pupils; while within twenty-five years a third grade has arisen known as the high-schools for the most advanced students. In each division there are sub-grades, and, wherever improvements in public-school education are attempted, the principle of gradation is fundamental. ”

“ Instead of working out and teaching methods of connecting the school with life, thus making it a centre and a source of inspiration that might gradually transform the communities about them, these colleges have too frequently permitted their graduates to go out with the idea that their diploma was a sort of patent of nobility, and that the possessor of it was a superior being who was making a sacrifice in merely bestowing himself or herself as a teacher upon the communities to which he or she was called. ”

“ Some of these opponents have gone so far as to assert that the customary college degree, Bachelor of Arts, stands as definitely for Latin and Greek as the degree M.D. stands for the study of medicine. Now, inasmuch as the college is the school in which, according to the best authorities, our young people are expected to gain a higher degree of education than the lower schools, academies, and high-schools can give them, the question. What constitutes the basis of higher education? ”

“ When the higher grades are reached, the pupils take more and more optional studies, and less and less required. And, as the curriculum widens toward the end of the course, the linguistic and scientific studies yield more and more to the inclination of the parent or the pupil, until the post-graduates of the high-school, as well as of the university, severally fall into chosen specialties, as their tastes and preparation may dictate. ”

“ In connection with higher education there are such new tendencies as university extension, correspondence courses, summer sessions, university interest in the practical problems of the people, the correlation of the first two years of college with the secondary school, more flexible entrance requirements, an increasing number of fields of professional work, and, above all, the professional training of teachers through Departments of Education, Teachers Colleges, and Schools of Education. ”

“ What, then, are the faculties which education is supposed to train? In my attempt to answer this question I will confine myself to the elementary school,—the only school which I can pretend to know well. A glance at the time-table of an ordinary elementary school might suggest to us that there were two chief groups of faculties to be trained—those which perceive and those which express, those which take in and those which give out. When such subjects as History, Geography, or Science are being taught, the child's perceptive faculties are being trained. ”

“ The term "college" can be properly used only of an institution which offers training in the liberal arts and sciences to youth who have completed a standard secondary school course of study. The purpose of college teaching is to lay the foundation for intelligent and effective specialization later on, to open the mind to new interpretations and new understandings both of man and of nature, and to give instruction in those standards of judgment and appreciation, the possession and application of which are the marks of the truly educated and cultivated man. ”

“ Our better normal schools—which are the only kind that might be expected to grant degrees—give instruction in literature, history, geography, fine art, etc., the same as the degree-conferring colleges. To these subjects the normal school adds the history of education and the principles of education, which are presumably harmless so long as they are not applied, and they usually are not. There remain then the subjects that involve practice, such as special method courses, applied psychology and practice teaching ”

“ There must always be a place for classical schools, scientific schools, professional schools, which, in their respective courses of study, either anticipate or follow, in the career of the student, his four years of college life. With these conditions and limitations stated, the point I seek to establish is that a public high school can do the work usually done in such institutions more faithfully, thoroughly, and economically, than it can be done anywhere else. ”

“ While many of the members of the faculty do, and may continue to, give courses in the other colleges, they have a distinct, organic connection with the teachers college. The teachers college is also getting to have, as a vital part of its equipment, a model high school bearing to it the same relationship that the model, or practise, school bears to our normal schools. ”

“ The academy and college take young men from the district and high schools, and furnish them with additional aids for the business of life; but the Normal School is truly the helper of the common schools. It receives its pupils from them, fits these pupils for teachers, and sends them back to superintend where a few months before they were scholars. ”

“ In several of our American cities the system has matured, during a period of some thirty-odd years, from the kindergarten to the university. These schools have produced whatever results the organism of the graded system is calculated to accomplish. The pupils have passed from the lowest grade, in regular order, in large classes, under similar programmes, in a uniform course, supervised by boards of trustees, and taught by instructors rising in literary attainments from grade to grade through the entire series. ”

“ While it is the work of science and scholarship, roughly what is known in American usage as graduate work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of learning and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and scholars, it is the undergraduate school, or college, that still continues to be the larger fact, and that still engages the greater and more immediate attention in university management. ”

“ The training of teachers for secondary schools is in several essential respects the same as that for teachers of elementary schools. Both demand scholarship, theory, and practice. The degree of scholarship required for secondary teachers is by common consent fixed at a collegiate education. No one—with rare exceptions—should be employed to teach in a high school who has not this fundamental preparation. ”

“ I believe that an honest observer of the highest institutions for learning in our land, whether they were founded for the interests of young men or young women, will remark that there is too small a chance for grouping studies, and that the opportunities for choosing electives are too few. The American idea is, to get through the academy or college, and graduate with a diploma, rather than to pursue a study till such time as those who know most about that branch of learning shall deem a student ready for entrance upon higher work. ”

“ It was discovered, also, that, in spite of the efforts being put forth by the normal schools, the higher teaching positions—superintendencies, high school principalships, etc.—were going to men of collegiate attainment, even at the sacrifice of professional training which was then being recognized as very desirable. ”

“ But accepting our colleges and universities as they are, at the same time discarding the results of tradition and of half-hearted experiment, what should the high school do? By high school we mean the instruction in the public school for four years of school life from the age of 13 or 14 to that of 17 or 18, resting on the primary and grammar school on the one hand and presumably leading to the college on the other—in most cases the last of the years in which a student lives at home and goes to school. ”

“ The great body of normal and training schools in the United States are secondary schools. Those who are to teach in these schools need broad scholarship, thorough understanding of educational problems, and trained experience. To put into these schools teachers whose scholarship is that of the secondary school and whose training is that of the elementary is to narrow and depress, rather than broaden and elevate. ”

“ At any rate, in this borderland between cultural and professional studies, where the college is merging with the university or professional school, the necessity for the able teacher is a paramount issue. ”

“ A student might, for the sake of a degree, go from a court school to a university, but, as a rule, if what he wished were a general course, he would be satisfied with the greater prestige that came from being a pupil of one of the distinguished humanists that the court schools were generally able to retain at their head. ”

“ The Arts student may, and often does, select courses that are not the most appropriate for high school teaching: for example, instead of a course in adolescence he may select one in child study which deals only with the child in the grades. Instead of a special methods course in the subjects he plans to teach in high school, he may select a course in methods in elementary subjects; and he may not take any course in secondary education nor have any practise teaching in the Model High School. ”

“ These features of the existing official and religious schools, which are quite in accord with their reactionary environment and aim, cannot, for the reasons I have given, be admitted into the Modern School. Since we are not educating for a specific purpose, we cannot determine the capacity or incapacity of the child. When we teach a science, or art, or trade, or some subject requiring special conditions, [56] an examination may be useful, and there may be reason to give a diploma or refuse one ”

“ The elective principle was broadened so as to bridge the gaps between preparatory school and college, and underclass and upperclass years, giving the student in his underclass years a broad general training in subjects deemed fundamental to real education, and in his upperclass years requiring him to follow continuous work in one of three divisions of studies, the literary-philosophical, the historical-economic, or the mathematical-scientific. ”

“ The misery of our system, whether in town or country, is that it assumes that the chief end of man is to figure in some one of the so-called “learned” professions. So the high school is keyed up to the standard of admission to the college and university. The grade school exists to qualify pupils for admission to the high school. ”

“ Again, as always, this is where hard work in elementary and in high school pays off: good grades in “solid” subjects are master keys to university gates. Entrance exams required by many schools are stiff, but a background of twelve years of conscientious study usually prepares you to deal with them. ”

“ If college graduates are put directly into teaching without special study and training, they will teach as they have been taught. The methods of college professors are not in all cases the best, and, if they were, high school pupils are not to be taught nor disciplined as college students are. High school teaching and discipline can be that neither of the grammar school nor of the college, but is sui generis. ”

“ The School of Education has been organized within the University for the specific purpose of preparing teachers for the high schools of the State. To graduate from the School of Education and thus receive the B.A. degree and the Bachelor's Diploma in teaching, which is accredited by law as a first-grade professional certificate, and also to be recommended for teaching specific subjects in the high-school, an applicant is required, first, to have specialized, academically, in the subject to be taught. ”