School term

“ Teaching (class and individual) .Beginning in the kindergarten, modelling should continue without a break through the ordinary term of school life. In the elementary stage class teaching is of the greatest value, but no such class should contain more than eighteen pupils. The advanced stage will require most individual teaching. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a widely prevalent doctrine, to which the customs of our best schools conform, that teachers of elementary schools should have a secondary or high school education, and that teachers of high schools should have a collegiate education. ”

“ Our primary-school system provided the rudiments for nearly all children, but not one in twenty went as far as the grammar school, not one in a hundred as far as the high school, and not one in a thousand ever saw a college. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have seen placed side by side, in the same burgh town, an English school, in which what are deemed the branches suitable for mechanics and their children, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, were energetically taught, and a grammar school in which a university-bred schoolmaster laboured, with really not much energy, especially in those lower departments in which his rival excelled, but who was fitted to prepare his pupils for college, and not devoid of the classical enthusiasm. ”

“ THE SCHOOL is for boys and girls, and includes under the same management an elementary school, comprising primary and grammar grades, and a secondary school, or academy proper, which fits boys and girls for Eastern and Western colleges. ”

“ A boy of eight in an Elementary school may shew more intelligence and wider knowledge than a boy of fourteen in a Preparatory school, that is, if he have been taught on the principles I have in view, while the other boy has been instructed with a view to a given standard of scholarship. The Preparatory school boy does, however, reach that standard in Latin, if not in Greek also, and in Mathematics. ”

“ The school also educates the will through its discipline. It demands of the pupil that he shall be obedient to the rules of order, and adopt habits that make it possible to combine with one's fellows. ”

“ On the other hand, those who are practically certain to drop out of school at the end of the grammar grades or junior high school should have full opportunities for applied science, applied design, practical mathematics, civics, hygiene, vocational studies, etc. ”

“ Examine a course of study and you will find revealed much of the judgment and mental caliber of the teachers49 of the school. It is not uncommon to find high schools proper with university curricula. High-sounding names, often, are an attempt to hide the fact that it is an ordinary high school and many times very ordinary indeed. ”

“ The greatest need of the primary school to-day is some positive content or subject matter of instruction. The popular conception of such a school is that its main function is to teach the young child to read, write, and cipher. ”

“ The secondary school course, on its academic side, is directed to one main end, and any pupil who enters such a school is regarded, irrespective of his natural aptitudes, as a prospective candidate for matriculation. Teachers may demur to the suggestion that their horizon is dominated by an examination: they may talk hopefully about a test which their pupils can take “in their stride.” But the fact remains that the work [24] of the upper part of the school is determined by requirements of an external body. ”

“ A boy in a telegraph or a lawyer's office has a better opportunity to reach influence than a boy in a workshop. The scholastic requirement for such advancement as these vocations contemplate, is provided for in the established school program of the lower grades. A certain display of a few historical and literary facts beside a facility in reading, writing, and arithmetic are the qualifications which average parents believe are the necessary ones for their children's advancement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Do you see system in the arrangement of the school, in the method of instruction, in the library department, and in the general discipline of the school? You will be orderly and correct in your deportment.
Eld. B. As I am almost old enough to be a teacher, and desire to take a class as soon as I am wanted, I should like to know the best way to make my scholars interested in their studies, so that they will attend and be correct with their lessons.
Teach. It is often the case that children feel no interest or pleasure in the school, because they do not understand its object. ”

“ The heavy emphasis upon this subject should be reserved for the later grades of the elementary school.
In the high schools, a little is being accomplished. In the academic high schools, those who take the classical course receive no civics whatever. ”

“ Today the school offers and compels a boy to get certain related courses of study which will make him a better citizen by fitting him in a measure for the procuring of an intelligent and adequate livelihood. The school by no means is perfect in this matter, and as long as over fifty per cent. of the boys fail to graduate even from the eighth grade in the grammar school, and but one per cent. ”

“ The course of instruction embraces all the subjects usually taught in good primary schools, in addition to which the upper classes receive instruction in French, Latin, Euclid, Algebra, Natural Philosophy, and Book-keeping. Much attention is given to Shorthand. Boys who remain sufficiently long in the school are prepared for the Civil Service and Matriculation Examinations. The school thus serves both as a Primary and an Intermediate School. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Secondly came the graded system, when the aim was to supply a measurable quantity of knowledge, to get per cents, and pass examinations. Thirdly emerged the modern school, which inquires into the child's nature and seeks to develop it. "Instead of viewing the new pupil as one more to be registered, put through geographies, arithmetics, and marked done, it recognizes an incipient man, and asks what the future may demand of him." ”

“ The fact is that the ordinary secondary school is attempting—unsuccessfully, of course—to give the same treatment to pupils of various types who, owing to lack of sufficiently varied provision for higher education, now find themselves herded together. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But at school, which now may seem to be called almost in mockery σχολή, or leisure, the true method is, after all, that patronized by the great educators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Boys at school must turn their mind into a row of pigeon-holes, filling as many as they can with useful notes, and never forgetting how many are empty. There is an immense amount of positive knowledge to be acquired between the ages of ten and eighteen—rules of grammar, strings of vocables, dates, names of towns, rivers, and mountains, mathematical formulas, etc. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Both experience and observation seem to justify this widespread adoption of the elective system, in some form, in secondary schools and colleges. During the years of secondary school and college education the pupil passes through the important stage of adolescence and youth. He emerges from childhood to manhood. ”

“ For example, one of the efforts of the elementary school is to teach pupils to write. It is entirely possible after the school has done its work to find out by an examination of the results how well pupils can write. It is never expected that pupils in the second grade will write as well as pupils in the upper grades. ”

“ In some cases a different course is wise undoubtedly,—as, for example, where a teacher is commencing a private school, on a previously well-digested plan of his own,—or where one who has had experience, and has confidence in his power to bring his new pupils promptly and at once into the system of classification and instruction which he prefers. ”

“ The Commissioner of Education of New York State writes of the schools,— [1] “A child is worse off in a graded school than in an ungraded one, if the work of a grade is not capable of some specific valuation, and if each added grade does not provide some added power. The first two grades run much to entertainment and amusement. The third and fourth grades repeat the work supposed to have been done in the first two. Too many unimportant and unrelated facts are taught. ”

“ The Purpose of the Elementary School.—To enable us to answer the question, what is the purpose of the public elementary school, it is necessary that we should first be able to decide what is the purpose of education. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What is the character of the education given in the home or the kindergarten preliminary to the work of the primary school? The answer to this question can be given negatively by saying it is not of a type which belongs to a public institution. When the pupil comes to primary school he must be reasonably prepared to live with people who are comparative strangers. ”

“ Another advantage their schools possess over ours is, that they are what, in American school-phraseology, is called ‘graded.’ This, unlike what I have just been mentioning, may be transplanted to our side of the water. I need not now explain what grading means, because I have spoken more than once of this method of arranging and teaching schools. It ensures much more careful teaching than our method, and that the whole of the school-time shall be devoted to study. ”

“ It proclaims its possessor a student but not a teacher. Yet, in our practices, we proceed upon the assumption that teacher and student are synonymous. We hold examinations for teachers in our schools, but not for teachers in our colleges of education. His degree is the magic talisman that causes the doors to swing wide open for him. ”