School life

“ School had developed her capacity for pleasure and enjoyment: not until Life had developed her capacity for sorrow and pain would her education be complete. School had taught her to speak, to dress, and to act correctly: Life must teach her to feel. ”

“ School days deal with an earlier period of life than the college age, when the student is usually more susceptible to strong influences. The school that first gave you the determination to do something worth while in the world, the school that called forth your best self and set your heart on fire with a noble purpose, has a claim upon you that you can never forget. ”

“ We owe it, then, to the reading-aloud fetich that in many of our schools the children are compelled to spend the last two (or even three) years of their school life—the most important years of all from the point of view of their preparation for the battle of life—in marking time, in staying where they were. ”

“ Beautifying the schoolhouse and schoolroom, having a library and a few pictures and casts, and making school life attractive are suggestions to be worked out, and the value of teaching sewing, cooking, the care of babies to girls, and manual training to boys.
IV—HIGH SCHOOLS
The subject of the high schools will naturally succeed this and the first paper may take up the question, Why do so few boys and girls go to high school? Is it only because so many go into business life? Is the preparation for college adequate? ”

“ But these aspects of school life have been, and still are, considered as diversions, as incidents and somewhat as detriments to what is called, in school parlance, the 'regular work.' It is largely due to this fact that in most schools the socializing process as yet remains inchoate. ”

“ To make all this more direct we may look to the various sources from which enthusiasm may be derived. What does the school give us in this direction? Intellectual drill, broadening of mental horizon, professional training, all this we expect from school, college, and university and in every phase of this there is room for a thousand enthusiasms. Moreover, the school gives us comradeship, the outlook on the hopes and aspirations of our fellows. It opens to us the resources of young life, the luminous visions of the boys that are to be men. ”

“ Here, and just here, public sentiment ought to relieve the teacher by reforming itself.
It should be understood that school-life is to be devoted to the thorough discipline of the mind to study, and to an acquaintance with those simple, elementary branches, which are the foundation of all good learning. When a knowledge of the elements is secured, then the languages, mathematics, and all [Pg 247] science, may be pursued with enthusiasm and success by a class of men well educated in every department. ”

“ In school work when we are successful children attend to those stimuli which promise most for the formation of habits, or the growth in understanding and appreciation which will fit them for participation in our social life. We seek constantly in our work as teachers to secure either free or forced attention to the particular part of our courses of study or to the particular experiences which are allotted to the grade or class which we teach. ”

“ Thus I have attempted to indicate how the school may be connected with life so that the experience gained by the child in a familiar, commonplace way is carried over and made use of there, and what the child learns in the school is carried back and applied in everyday life, making the school an organic whole, instead of a composite of isolated parts. ”

“ It deals in a bright and vigorous style with the kaleidoscopic, throbbing life of a great public school—that world in miniature which, in its daily opportunities and temptations, ambitions and failures, has so often afforded superabundant material for narratives powerful to enchain the attention and sway the emotions, whether to smiles or tears. ”

“ But while he was putting in a perfunctory attendance at lectures, his education was proceeding in another school—the school which, as in his after years he so insistently testified, affords the only real discipline for life—the world of real men and women. ”

“ Having stationed the duty of acquiring knowledge in the center, connect with it the various lesser duties of school life, such as punctual attendance, order, diligent and conscientious preparation of home lessons, etc. These are means to an end, and should be represented as such. He who desires the end will desire the means. Get your pupils to love knowledge, and the practice of these minor virtues will follow of itself. ”

“ THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD Last week I tried to put before you the relationship between the school and the larger life of the community, and the necessity for certain changes in the methods and materials of school work, that it might be better adapted to present social needs. ”

“ Experience has shown that the daily life of the individual pupil, and the varied activities of the school can be made to furnish practically all of the theme subjects not only for first year composition, but also for that of the other three years. ”

“ 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 addition to its purely educational advantages, the social and moral atmosphere of the school is of a high grade, tending to the building of character, the refinement of manners, and the cultivation of the real amenities of life. ”

“ The work of instruction, while it is going forward, should be the business of both teachers and scholars. If children are habituated to industry, to close application, to hard study, and to good personal, social, and moral habits during the period of their attendance upon school, these habits will be favorably felt in after life, in the development of characters whose possessors will be at once respectable and useful members of society, and a blessing to the age in which they live. ”

“ The characteristic note of the school, distinguishing it even from some which pass as progressive models, is that in it the faculties of the children shall develop freely without subjection to any dogmatic patron, not even to what it may consider the body of convictions of the founder and teachers; every pupil shall go forth from it into social life with the ability to be his own master and guide his own life in all things. ”

“ The school, the whole school, is your field, the elevation of the mass, in knowledge and virtue, and no individual instance, either of dulness or precocity, should draw you away from its steady pursuit.
(6.) The teacher should guard against unnecessarily imbibing those faulty mental habits, to which his station and employment expose him. Accustomed to command, and to hold intercourse with minds which are immature and feeble, compared with our own, we gradually acquire habits, that the rough collisions and the friction of active life, prevent from gathering around other men. ”

“ At eight and twenty you will know a good deal more, at eight and forty if you use life rightly, you will have discarded a good deal of the youthful knowledge, and taken on maturer thoughts. Schooldays do not end with the close of a school for vacation. You observe that goes on after a little rest. And the real scholars go on. All life is a school. ”

“ The success of these courses in bringing boys back to school, in enabling others to catch up with their grade, and in keeping others in school, points strongly to the fact that for a great many pupils at least some work which will link their school course to the activities of everyday life is necessary. ”

“ But the Public School teacher will accomplish much if, reverently and sympathetically, he endeavours to preserve the freshness and ingenuousness of childhood and, by the influence of his own example, while leading the pupil up the golden ladder of mental acquisition, he encourages the cultivation of those graces of life which are the best adornments of youth.'—Feb. ”

“ But a school based on the fundamental facts of life and labor, the need of food and housing, and the sweating skill that brings man most of his blessings. A school from which no man could come out ignorant. ”

“ Besides the injection of industrial and vocational training in large quantity in public school curricula, more thought and place will have to be given to the expression of the boy life in play than is now provided for. ”

“ To all children, so soon as they can be promoted from the kinder garten—perhaps even to the higher grades therein—instruction in the conditions of human well-being, and in the phenomena and arrangements of social life should be given, and should be continued throughout their school career. ”

“ In these Public Schools the whole education of children is directed to the cultivation of their heads or intellectual faculties alone. The heart, with all its moral and mysterious emotions, is entirely [Pg 80] neglected. Every mental power and acquirement is intended and directed to promote their prosperity, success, and happiness in this life ”

“ The ordinary school studies present this not as a mere accumulation, not as a miscellaneous heap of separate bits of experience, but in some organized way. Hence, the daily experiences of the child, his life from day to day, and the subject matter of the schoolroom, are parts of the same thing; they are the first and last steps in the life of a people. ”

“ The lessons you learn at school will give you strength and skill in after life, and power, just in proportion to the accuracy, the clearness of perception with which you learn your lessons. The school was your gymnasium. ”

“ In short, all his experiences may be capitalized under the direction of a skillful teacher, and made to produce large dividends as an investment in life.
Relation to school work.—Thus the school becomes, for the child, a place of and for real life, and 28not a place detached from life. There he lives effectively, and joyously, because the teacher knows how to utilize his experiences and native dispositions for the enlargement of his life. He has no inclination to become a deserter or a tenant, for life is agreeable there, and the school is made his chief interest. ”

“ Firm after firm announces that their employees must have at least a good high school education. The mental discipline and self-control128 given by a good high school course will give self-direction and grasp of conditions to your boy long after the Latin endings and algebraic formulae which gave the discipline have been forgotten. It is discipline for life’s duties that is the real worth of the high school to the boy. ”

“ To him and to all of us, the expressly appointed schoolmasters and schoolings we get are as nothing, compared with the unappointed incidental and continual ones, whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence, and whose lessons, noticed or unnoticed, stream in upon us with every breath we draw. ”

“ Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction every day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school. ”

“ In my opinion it is unwise to judge a young man by his school record. We have too many examples of bad students becoming distinguished men, and, on the other hand, of brilliant students not being at all remarkable in life. ”

“ The school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes. ”

“ We are apt to look at the school from an individualistic standpoint, as something between teacher and pupil, or between teacher and parent. That which interests us most is naturally the progress made by the individual child of our acquaintance, his normal physical development, his advance in ability to read, write, and figure, his growth in the knowledge of geography and history, improvement in manners, habits of promptness, order, and industry—it is from such standards as these that we judge the work of the school. ”

“ Every child on attaining the age of six must now attend a Common Elementary School, where during a four years' course instruction is given in morals, reading, writing, arithmetic, the rudiments of technical work, gymnastics, and poetry. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And I am confident that the parents who have intrusted their children to us for any length of time will agree in saying that, while the children like, or love, to come to school, yet work, and not amusement, has been the spirit and teaching of the school ”

“ Evening after evening, the boys and girls assemble and with text-books or library books, do those things in the school which are impossible in the home. For what other purpose should the school exist? ”

“ He seemed, in short, to harmonise by their combination in himself all the various qualities proper to a large and varied community of youths of nineteen or twenty, to which, when actually present there, he was felt from hour to hour to be indispensable. In fact school habits and standards had survived in a world not so different from that of school for those who are faithful to its type. ”

“ The everyday work of the school shows that children can live in school as out of it, and yet grow daily in wisdom, kindness, and the spirit of obedience—that learning may, even with little children, lay hold upon the substance of truth that nourishes the spirit, and yet the forms of knowledge be observed and cultivated; and that growth may be genuine and thorough, and yet a delight. ”

“ The school should be to the pupil not an intellectual drill-ground, but a second home; a place dear at the time, and to be gratefully remembered ever after; a place in which his whole nature, and especially what is best in him, may expand and grow. ”