School system

“ The great public school system, all colleges and universities—the entire educational system, high and low—is society's most spectacular attempt to prepare youth to meet the problems of life. However, the collective influence of these institutions is but one factor among many. ”

“ The American public-school system originated in the theory that the State owes to every child the rudiments of a common education, or an elementary knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic, as implements of after mental improvement. ”

“ We ventured to hope that such an example, having once been set, would not be without effect upon the common-school system at large, and that the extension of our work would proceed by the natural course of the ‘survival of what is fittest.’ It was decided, therefore, that the twenty-five graduates from the kindergarten should be invited to remain with us, that a complete school should be instituted, and that a teacher should be at once appointed to take in hand the instruction of the lowest class. ”

“ Under the influence of normal schools, teachers' institutes, systematic superintendence, school boards, regulative legislation, and an extensive literature devoted specially to education, they have become organized into a system which is gradually growing settled and unified in its methods. With unbounded means and unlimited authority, these schools have undertaken to form the mental habits of the great mass of the youth of this country. They prescribe the subjects of study, the modes of study, and the extent and duration of studies for all the pupils that come under their charge. ”

“ Our school system continues to experience difficulties in accommodating the annual increment to the school population; in improving the quality of instruction at all levels; and in efficiently utilizing the output of our colleges and universities. ”

“ It has been a difficult task to bring our public school system to the present condition of progress. The work has proceeded slowly and steadily under the example and inspiration of great educational centers. ”

“ In the last analysis, the work of building up such a school system as I have suggested must fall upon the industrial normal schools and colleges which prepare the teacher, because it is the success or failure of the teacher which determines the success 311of the school. In order to make a beginning in the direction which I have indicated, the different schools and colleges will have to spend much less time in the future than they have in the past in quarrelling over the kind of education the Negro ought to have and devote more time and attention to giving him some kind of education. ”

“ Though there is much interest in all these higher institutions of learning, as well as in the normal schools and academies, many of which are prosperous and important, yet the common schools more particularly engage the attention of the people and of the successive legislatures, resulting in a complication of school laws scarcely balanced by the improvement in the school system. ”

“ Public education shall be organically developed. The foundation school, which shall be common to all, shall lead on to the secondary and higher school system. This organisation shall keep in view the variation of vocations ”

“ And my experience of this system compared with others has led me to the conclusion that the form of education which may on the whole claim to be the best is that of a well-organized day school, in which it is clearly understood to be the duty of the masters to give their life to the boys in school and out of school, just as if they were at a boarding school, and in which the boys are distributed into houses for school purposes, just as if they were living in a boarding house. Under such a system they get the best of both worlds, home and school. ”

“ The situation, therefore, calls at once for examination reform, but it calls also for far more: we must harmonize under a sufficiently large ideal the various phases of developmental education. The elementary school, the secondary school, the college, have not yet been viewed and organized as essentially a single educational institution. Pending and in aid of their reorganization on this basis, I urge the colleges to emphasize the vital, not the mechanical, side of preparatory teaching; to establish fixedly no machinery that may impede the creation of a system subtly adapted to the individual. ”

“ The technique of the school will be determined in its details by the peculiarity of its aim. But in general every school, no matter what it teaches, ought to have some system of rules and regulations by which the relation of the pupil to the institution, of the pupils to each other, their relation to the teacher, and that of the teachers to each other as well as to the supervisory authority, the programme of lessons, the apparatus, of the changes of work and recreation, shall be clearly set forth. ”

“ The change from the old to the new lines of education is even more marked in the common schools than in the colleges and universities. The practical begins in the free kindergarten and runs with more or less directness through all the grades. Millions are expended upon industrial training. The business high schools are a great feature of the free school system. ”

“ Parents and children would regulate the course of study according to their own crude notions; and, instead of having institutions which agree in carrying on a similar course of study, each school would have its own peculiar system, and compete and conflict with every other. Meantime, the public would have no means of deciding which was best, nor any opportunity for learning when a professional man was properly qualified for his duties. ”

“ The true Normal School instructs only in the art of teaching; and, in this respect, it must be confessed we have failed, sadly failed, to realize the ideal of the system. It is not a substitute for the common school, academy, or college, though many pupils, and in some degree the public, have been inclined thus to treat it. There should be no instruction in the departments of learning, high or low, except what is incidental to the main business of the institution ”

“ In the public school the system rallied around a common center—its course of study. All the agencies employed were to render that course effective. Out of a supplemental lesson system will arise conditions that will crystallize into correlation of departments, methods of promotion, a Normal Department with its commencement day, and, best of all, by the help of the home and the church, an atmosphere of study for the scholar without which a school cannot be. ”

“ The building we here set apart, and the school we now inaugurate to the service of learning, are to be regarded as the completion of the original plan of the state, and any future extension will depend upon the success of the Normal system as it shall appear in other years to other generations of men. But we have great faith that the Normal system, in itself and in its connections, will realize the cherished idea of our whole history; and if so, it will be extended until every school is supplied with a Normal teacher. ”

“ Is it possible that any of the means of a common-school education are necessarily denied to a million and a quarter of industrious people, who already possess an aggregate capital of seven or eight hundred millions of dollars? But the character of a high school must always depend materially upon the previous training of the pupils, and the qualifications required for admission. When the high school is a public school, the studies of the primary and grammar or district schools are arranged with regard to the system as a system. ”

“ The emancipation of the school can never reasonably mean its abstract isolation, The Modality of the Process of Teaching.75 or the absorption of the ecclesiastical and political life into the school; it can signify only the free reciprocal action of the school with state and church. It must never be forgotten that what makes the school a school is not the total process of education, for this falls also within the family, the state, and the church; but that the proper work of the school is the process of instruction, knowledge, and the acquirement, by practice, of skill. ”

“ And then look further, and see how, under a system of public instruction, you can build up, from year to year, in the growth of the child, a system according to his wants. Private instruction cannot do this. What do we do where we have a correct system? A child goes into a primary school. He is not to go out when he attains a certain age. He might as well go out when he is of a certain [Pg 158] height; there would be as much merit in one case as in the other. But he is advanced when he has made adequate attainments. ”

“ A National System of Industrial and Vocational Education Should Be Established
The school is a social institution whose functions are becoming daily more widely understood and more clearly defined. In the history of civilization, the school, as we know it, is a very recent institution. ”

“ There, perhaps more consistently than anywhere else in the United States, the school authorities are providing for the whole child in their schools. Many schools have manual training and domestic science; many schools have school gardens and playgrounds; many schools have nature work in the parks and squares; but in no school that I have visited did I find a more conscious effort to unite mental and physical, hand and head, and vocation and recreation, in one complete system. ”

“ He held to the principle that we are bound in duty to use the school as a means of helpfulness in the world and that every true educational principle takes issue with any system of instruction that omits to call upon the school to take its place in the state as a constructive agency in the highest social economy. ”

“ It is not enough to gather from within a circle of half a dozen miles’ diameter fifty or sixty children for a single school. This brings all ages and all studies into the same room. A good system requires a separation of school children into four, or at least into three, classes, according to ages and attainments. ”

“ School administration is much more efficient as is demonstrated by a uniform course of study for elementary and high schools, vitalized by its articulation with the industrial activities of the community, county uniformity of textbooks, selection and correlation of textbook material and its adaptation to the varying interests and needs of childhood, uniform system of reports and records, and the like. ”

“ Every good school must be systematic; but they need not all be on precisely the same system. As this work is intended almost exclusively for beginners, much detail has been admitted, and many of the specific measures here proposed, may perhaps be safely adopted, where no others are established. There may also perhaps be cases, where teachers, whose schools are already in successful operation, may engraft, upon their own plans, some things which are here proposed. ”

“ The struggle should be perpetual and in the right direction. First, elevate your common schools so that the education there may be a sufficient basis for a course of training here. If the Normal School and the public schools shall each and all do their duty, candidates for admission will be so well qualified in the branches required, that the art of teaching will be the only art taught here. ”

“ In these vital tasks of acquiring a broader view of human possibilities the common school must have a large part. I urge that teachers and other school officers increase materially the time and attention devoted to instruction bearing directly on the problems of community and national life.—Woodrow Wilson. ”

“ Schools were declared to be essentially civil affairs; their purpose was asserted to be to promote the common welfare and advance the interests of the political State; ministers of education began to be appointed by the State to take over and exercise control; the citizen supplanted the ecclesiastic in the organization of education and the supervision of classroom teaching; the instruction in the school was changed in direction, and in time vastly broadened in scope; and the education of all now came to be conceived of as a birthright of the child of every citizen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The effort toward diversification which has resulted in putting manual training into courses of study, in multiplying courses in high schools, in providing ungraded and other special rooms in elementary schools, in breaking grades up into groups for teaching and promotions, in keeping playgrounds and shops open afternoons and Saturdays, in opening the school buildings evenings for social centers or socialized evening schools,—which has resulted in all these changes and others that might be mentioned,—is simply an effort to make the schools like life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It will not necessarily happen that public schools will furnish to every child and youth the desired amount of education. Professional schools, classical schools, and academies of various grades, will be continued; but there is an amount of intellectual and moral training needed by every child which can be best given in the public school. This training in the public schools ought to be carried much further than it usually is. ”