Rote learning

“ Thus, they adapt with difficulty to the requirements of the workplace. Training schemes of longer periods have yielded better results. They allow time for remedial education, for strengthening the confidence of trainees, and for building on trainees’ specific learning abilities. ”

“ Educational reformers may go on attacking pouring-in methods of teaching and passive reception methods of learning; but as long as these ideas of the nature of knowledge are current, they make little headway. The separation of the activity of the mind from the activity of the senses in direct observation and from the activity of the hand in construction and manipulation, makes the material of studies academic and remote, and compels the passive acquisition of information imparted by textbook and teacher. ”

“ The first reduces the merely natural to a tool which mind shall use for its own ends; the second guides the intelligence, by ways conformable to its nature, to the necessary method of the act of teaching and learning, which finally branches out into an objective national life, into a system of mutually dependent school organizations. ”

“ It leaves both the pursuit of learning and the work of preparation for the professions somewhat at loose ends, confused with the bootless illusion that they are, in some recondite way, parallel variants of a single line of work. ”

“ But, side by side with the higher institutions of learning, there should be established schools where the sciences in their relations to the arts and industries shall be specific branches of instruction and training; the addition of a sufficient amount of work in the handling of tools and the manipulation of materials to a good sound education in languages, mathematics, history, and science. Young people should be prepared to take a broad and intelligent part in the life of an age which is eminently scientific and practical ”

“ Perhaps at a farther remove than many other current phenomena, but none the less effectually for that, the higher learning takes its character from the manner of life enforced on the group by the circumstances in which it is placed. These constraining circumstances that so condition the scope and method of learning are primarily, and perhaps most cogently, the conditions imposed by the state of the industrial arts, the technological situation ”

“ All this applies with gradually lessened force to the other vocational schools, occupied with training for occupations that are of more substantial use to the community and less widely out of touch with the higher learning. ”

“ It should by no means be an insuperably difficult matter to show that this "higher learning" of the modern world, the current body of science and scholarship, also holds its place on such a tenure of use and wont, that it has grown and shifted in point of content, aims and methods in response to the changes in habits of life that have passed over the Western peoples during the period of its growth and ascendancy. ”

“ It means the addition of practice to theory, experiment to knowledge, the correct eye and skilful hand to the developed brain; that the youth sent forth from school shall be fitted not only for professions and clerkships, but for the heat and task of active life, and for the skilled labor which is so sorely needed. There exist much general misapprehension and no little grave misrepresentation as to industrial schools and manual training, and an attempt in some quarters to confound them with the stupefying effect of long-continued toil. ”

“ There is no doubt of the value of manual training as an aid in giving definiteness, directness, exactness to the mind, but mere technical training alone will be barren of those results, in general discriminating culture, which we hope to see in America.
The common school is a machine of incalculable value. ”

“ The work of learning, which distinctively belongs in the university, on the other hand, is a matter of personal contact and co-operation between teacher and student, and is not measurable in statistical units or amenable to mechanical tests ”

“ Our reorganized school systems show what a specific educational value manual training has, not alone in the manual skill which the child attains, but also in the mental, moral and economic values which it gains. ”

“ Either we must train the pupil in a general way so that he will be able to acquire specialized skill more quickly and more effectively than will the pupil who lacks this general training; or we must give up a large part of the general-culture courses that now occupy an important part in our elementary and secondary curriculums, and replace these with technical and vocational subjects that shall have for their purpose the development of specialized efficiency. ”

“ We, therefore, have undertaken to institute a reform in education in the following two ways: We begin industrial instruction at the very earliest age possible. Already in our kindergarten we lay the foundation for the system of work instruction that is to follow. In the school proper, then, we seek to bridge over the interval lying between the preparatory kindergarten training and the specialized instruction of the technical school, utilizing the school age itself for the development of industrial ability. ”

“ Institutions should aspire both to create OER and to use OER from elsewhere. Well-designed learning resources encourage greater individual engagement by students with information, ideas and content than is possible with lectures alone. By making such resources an integral part of the teaching and learning process, limited face-to-face teaching time with students can be more effectively used to foster engagement and to nurture discussion, creativity, practical applications and research activities. ”

“ All these prelearned movements and associations are brought into service in the early stages of improvement, and a degree of proficiency is quickly attained which cannot be exceeded so long as these prelearned habits and asso-

ciations alone are employed. Further advance in speed and accuracy is dependent upon combinations more difficult to make because they involve organization of the old and acquisition of new methods of thought or movement. When such a difficulty is faced, a plateau in the learning curve is almost inevitable. ”

“ I thus propose to remove from the science of education matters belonging to much wider departments of human conduct, and to concentrate the view upon what exclusively pertains to education—the means of building up the acquired powers of human beings. The communication of knowledge is the ready type of the process, but the training operation enters into parts of the mind not intellectual—the activities, and the emotions; the same forces, however, being at work.
Education does not embrace the employment of all our intellectual functions. ”

“ Manual and Industrial Training.—The marvelous industrial development of recent years, together with the attitude of labor unions towards apprenticeships, creates a demand for a reconstruction of courses of study. Much of education that was secured in the shop and field must now be furnished in the school. "Educate the whole child" is the watchword. The motor activities must be trained as well as the mental activities. Indeed, the latter cannot attain their proper development without the former. Hence, manual training has been adopted as a part of the curriculum. ”

“ Meanwhile the amount of special preliminary training which must be undergone in order to fit a person for new and original work in any department of knowledge or art increases at the same rate, and makes greater and greater inroads upon the time which is needed for general education. At present the most important, delicate, and complicated of educational problems, the problem which each individual must meet and decide upon, and the problem which engrosses most of the thought of educational bodies, is where to draw the line between general culture and practical or technical training. ”

“ Nor can I, in declaring manual training to be inadequate to the full demands of a rational education, omit to emphasize that it is the only scheme, including sloyd and the kindergarten, that has attempted to build up the educational process on organic grounds, and that it is inadequate, not because of any fundamental mistake in its philosophy, or inaccuracy in its methods, but simply because these methods do not yet go far enough. You know, perhaps, the rallying cry of manual training—put the whole boy to school—but in reality it does not yet do this. ”

“ If the pupil in the Manual Training School makes as rapid progress intellectually as the pupil in the public or private school of corresponding grade, it follows that whatever skill in the use of tools is acquired, and whatever knowledge of practical mechanics is gained—these stand for the net gain of the pupil of the new system of education. ”

“ And here is the mistake of those who would degrade a manual training school into a manufacturing establishment. The fact should never be lost sight of for an instant that the product of the school should be, not the polished article of furniture, not the perfect piece of machinery, but the polished, perfect boy. The acquisition of industrial skill should be the means of promoting the general education of the pupil; the education of the hand [351] should be the means of more completely and more efficaciously educating the brain.... ”

“ Now a definite course of study is very hard to construct,—a course that will tell explicitly what the pupils of each grade should acquire each term or half-term in the way of habits, knowledge, ideals, attitudes, and prejudices. But such a course of study is the first requisite to efficiency in teaching. The system that goes by hit or miss, letting each teacher work out his own salvation in any way that he may see fit, is just an aggregation of such schools as that which I have described. ”

“ None of our graduate schools require any course in education or teaching methods, or any previous experience in teaching work for a Ph. D. degree, except, of course, in the field of education, where theory is cultivated, if not practised. May it not be found that the best method to increase the teaching efficiency of the undergraduate instruction in colleges and universities will be to provide every graduate student with definite and detailed instruction in teaching methods for his chosen subject? ”

“ The question is, How far does the special training one gets in home and school fit him to react to the environment of life with its new and complex situations? Put in another way, the question is what effect upon other bonds does forming this particular situation response series of bonds have. The practical import of the question and its answer is tremendous. Most of our present school system, both in subject matter and method, is built upon the assumption that one answer is correct--if it is false, much work remains to be done by the present-day education. ”

“ We should form a mistaken estimate of the purposes of this institution if we were to suppose that its only, or even that its main object, was to furnish the means of instruction to those who, by the accidents of their position have lacked, or have enjoyed but to a limited extent, the advantages of the scholastic or academical training. That, no doubt, is one of the beneficial aims which this society endeavors to overtake. ”

“ As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill. ”

“ If the number of distinct lines of instruction is relatively large, and if, as happens, they are distributed scatteringly among the members of the staff, with a relatively large assignment of hours to each man, so as to admit no assured and persistent concentration on any point, the run of instruction offered will necessarily be of this perfunctory character, and will therefore be of such amateurish and pedantic quality. ”

“ It is sometimes pointed out that in the training of teachers there is danger that competition will arise between the demand for skill in methods and the demand for knowledge of subject-matter. The specialist in science scoffs at a course in methods of teaching, saying that all the prospective teacher needs is to know the subject thoroughly, and method will take care of itself. Furthermore, such a critic of methods often points out that the time required for a course in methods must be taken from time which the student ought to devote to subject-matter. ”

“ Experience has convinced the instructors that any course, particularly an introductory one, which deals in specious generalizations and vague trends of development to the exclusion of a thorough drill in concrete facts will, of necessity, be a failure; and so the methods of instruction are designed, first of all, to secure an accurate knowledge of events,—to make the student master the fundamental data upon which any real comprehension of a great movement as a whole must be based. ”

“ A system of instruction, intended not for children but for men, which is not an attempt to make good the defects of early education, but addresses itself to minds already trained and disciplined, cannot be regulated mechanically. In all intelligent education the order of teaching is at once natural and rational. The subjects group themselves by their relation to the end in view, and the necessity of each new advance is evident to the student as soon as he is prepared for it. ”

“ Rather does such an art remain to be discovered, and this discovery should be the real task of the new education. What was lacking in the old system—namely, an influence penetrating to the roots of vital impulse and action—the new education must supply. Accordingly, as the old system was able at best to train some part of man, so the new must train man himself, and must make the training given, not, as hitherto, the pupil’s possession, but an integral part of himself. ”