School education

“ Participation on the part of elementary school teachers in the work and studies of the Universities has always seemed to me to constitute a real need of culture and of primary education. For the elementary school, by the very nature of the professional training of its teachers, is exposed to a grave danger from which it must be rescued if we mean to keep it alive. ”

“ That a common school education increases his chances four times.
(3) That a high school education will increase the chances over the common school twenty-three times, or make his chances for distinction eighty-seven times as great as if he were without education. ”

“ It is for you, wherever you are placed, to seek to establish schools, and to make these schools as efficient as possible, and to help by your example and by your work to make the people believe that what is being done for the education of their children is for their good, that school training sharpens the intellect, strengthens the reason, and produces better manners. ”

“ Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development; ”

“ 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. ”

“ Under the phrase, 'Education is a life,' I have tried to show how necessary it is to sustain the intellectual life upon ideas, and, as a corollary, that a school-book should be a medium for ideas, and not merely a receptacle for facts. That normal children have a natural desire for, and a right of admission to, all fitting knowledge, appears to me to be suggested by the phrase, 'Education is the science of relations.'
These considerations clear the ground towards that of a curriculum. ”

“ The notion is gradually gaining ground that common-school education is as good as college education; that extension lectures and summer classes are acceptable substitutes for continuous study and mental discipline; that reading translations of the classics is better, because easier, than reading the classics themselves ”

“ Of course we must remember that the education of the school is powerfully reinforced by the education of the family, the community, the State, and the Church, and that the school is not the only educational influence, nor the most potent one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A broad conception at the end of the century of the work of the schools is simply this, to teach the children to think accurately, with strength and with speed. If it is in the school that they get their start, then where do they get their education? ”

“ The public school has the power, and should exercise it, to bring within its walls all the children physically and mentally competent to attend it. If children are under intelligent observation, departures from the normal can in many instances be recognized in time for training and education according to the particular need. ”

“ Instruction versus Education.—Many persons contend that the aim of the school is not so much education as instruction. [190] They consider that the main factor in education is not the school, but the family. But this is certain, that even in the school which thinks only of instructing its pupils, education in the wider sense is effected. In school life, in school friendships, in the sense of solidarity, in the friendly competition between schoolfellows, in the necessity to learn, are embodied powerful educative influences. ”

“ Teachers are beginning to see that education has its beginning in, and that it is always conditioned by, the life of the child outside of the school building. The possibilities of the school as an institution for the education of children are just beginning to be realized. ”

“ In short, it means that the school-system should be adapted to the boy and not the boy to the system, and, further, that education authorities should regard it as part of their function to guide into proper channels the special abilities which the teachers have reared. ”

“ The school of the future, which will be a school for all, will advance general education, but the plan it follows will be adapted to every individual. In the school of my dreams there will be no report books, no rewards, no examinations; at graduation time examinations will be arranged for but they will be oral. In them detailed knowledge will not be considered; education as a whole will determine the decision of the examiners, who will personally accompany the children in the open air in order to become quietly acquainted with what they know of mankind, of past and present history. ”

“ There it is first sought to develop the child's intellectual faculties, prepare it for school, inculcate habits of cleanliness and morality, and instruct it in the rudiments of reading and writing. Between the ages of six and fourteen children are admitted into the schools, and, nominally at least, go through the plan of study drawn up by the board of primary education, and which is as follows: Reading, writing, geography, spelling, arithmetic, compendium of sacred and French history, linear drawing, singing, the rudiments of physics, geometry and natural history, and calligraphy. ”

“ MANUAL TRAINING THE CHIEF FACTOR IN EDUCATION.
CHAPTER I.
THE IDEAL SCHOOL. Its Situation. — Its Tall Chimney. — The Whir of Machinery and Sound of the Sledge-hammer. — The School that is to dignify Labor. — The Realization of the Dream of Bacon, Rousseau, Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. — The School that fitly represents the Age of Steel.
The Ideal School is an institution which develops and trains to usefulness the moral, physical, and intellectual powers of man. It is what Comenius called Humanity’s workshop, and in America it is becoming the natural center of the Public School system. ”

“ To help such children succeed in school, meet the State academic standards that all children are expected to meet, and graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education and the workforce without the need for remediation. ”

“ No doubt children are well taught and happy in their lessons as things are, and this was specially true of the school in question; yet both teachers and children find an immeasurable difference between the casual interest roused by marks, pleasing oral lessons and other school devices, and the sort of steady avidity for knowledge that comes with the awakened soul. ”

“ Your best plea for the education of their children must be that the elementary education we impart to them will not be confined to the three R's, but will gradually include a knowledge of the things they should know for the intelligent and progressive use of their art, the cultivation of the eye, the dexterity of the hand,—that in the school must be laid the basis of special knowledge, on which the efficiency of the individual worker can best be cultivated. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One hears, for instance, of an adolescent school with some nine thousand pupils who come in batches of a few hundreds, each batch to learn one or other of a score or so of admirable crafts and accomplishments; but not one hour is spent in a three or four years’ course in this people’s university on any sort of humane knowledge, in any reading or thinking which should make the pupils better men and women and better citizens. ”

“ Tho design of the common school is to take children at the proper ago from their mothers, and give them the most indispensable development, intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious; to furnish thorn with as much positive useful knowledge as they can master, and, at the same time, teach them the three great scholastic helps or tools of education—the art to read, to write, and calculate.
Tho children of most parents are easily brought to school, by a little diligence on tho part of the teachers and school committee ”

“ The school is the place where children should become the embodiment of ideas. It would be a grand and not impractical scheme of education to propose to make the school a place where each child, in a well-chosen succession, should be allowed to impersonate and become the embodiment of the constructive ideas of our civilization. ”

“ Keep pupils in school longer. Hundreds of pupils are kept in school and do good work because of their desire and their parents’ desire that they graduate. The desire for a diploma may not be the highest motive for an education, but so far all of our best institutions have found it necessary to hold to the custom. ”

“ By good teaching we here mean that provision of school experience wherein the child is wholeheartedly active in acquiring the ideas and skill needed to deal with the problems of his expanding life. That our present instruction falls far short of this standard must be obvious to all who are not blinded by their professional adherence to narrow scholastic measures of efficiency, or by their loyal appreciation of the great contributions already made by schools in spite of their defects. ”

“ Recognizing the significant amount of time our children spend in school, we have also created partnerships with States under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to assist school districts in developing curriculum materials, providing teacher training, and integrating character education into the curriculum. ”

“ Consider finally the literature treating of study. Certainly there has never been a period when there was a more general interest in education than during the last twenty years, and the progress that has been made in that time is remarkable. Our study of the social view- point, of child nature, of apperception, interest, induction, deduction, correlation, etc., has been rapidly revolutionizing the school, securing a much more sympathetic government of young people, a new curriculum, and far more effective methods of instruction. ”

“ It conceives of teaching as a spiritual process, of education as the wholesome development and adaptation of life to its environment, and finds the conditions of successful teaching in conforming to the common laws of life and growth. Its aim is to secure to children the educative influence of a natural, sane, and wholesome school life as a part of the larger world-life. Its successive chapters discuss the vital problems arising in the management and organization of schools and school systems.”—Outlook. ”

“ The method of studying schools can safely be said to be established. It is the work of the future to take up, now this problem, now that, and by progressive stages to work out a complete science of school management and classroom organization. ”

“ Each for a time furnished the new ideas in education, each introduced elements of importance into the elementary-school instruction, each deeply influenced the training of teachers in normal schools by giving a new turn to the instruction there, and each gradually settled down into its proper place in educational practice and history. ”

“ We are still confronted with the problem of what we are to do with those pupils who do not take kindly to the secondary school curriculum but who, by their very presence in secondary schools, show their readiness to undergo some form of higher instruction. ”

“ The increase of our children from fifteen to almost one hundred, along with a practical doubling of fees, has shown that parents are ready for a form of education that makes individual growth its sole controlling aim. The presence of an organized corps of instructors demonstrates that thoroughly educated teachers are ready to bring to elementary education the same resources of training, knowledge, and skill that have long been at the command of higher education. ”

“ The type of individual difference which develops when pupils begin to look forward to their places in the practical world is of great significance in organizing school work. School experience in this matter is clearly reflected in the following resolution adopted in 1915 by the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association:
Resolved, That we note with approval the increasing tendency to establish, beginning with the seventh grade, differentiated courses of study aimed more effectively to prepare the child for his probable future activities. ”

“ Thanks to a teacher’s loving efforts, the children of the primary school may reach the highest levels of achievement; indeed, his benefactions may lift some child of small account to an exalted throne. Thus is it clearly demonstrated that by their essential nature, minds vary as to their capacity, while education also playeth a great role and exerteth a powerful effect on their development. ”

“ In the educational excitement of to-day we scarcely realize how far the modern school is passing out of that era when the program for work and study was carefully constructed with a view to the child’s “preparation for life.” Educators saw the world as divided into two radically different classes, adults and school-children. The adults were functioning in a definite sphere, using a certain self-contained and common body of knowledge to do their work and make their way in the world. ”