Seat of learning

“ Founded primarily as seats of learning, their teachers have been not only scientists and linguists, philosophers and historians, but men and women of holy purposes, sound patriotism, courageous convictions, refined and noble tastes. ”

“ Now the aims of academic education and those of popular education are—it is obvious if you come to think of it—quite different. The end of the one is rather to increase knowledge: of the other to diffuse it, and to increase men's interest in what is already known. If, therefore, I am for making certain kinds of instruction as general as they can possibly be made in these local centres, I should give to the old seats of learning a very special function indeed. ”

“ But who can say that any curriculum that can be packed into the years of school life and the years of college life combined contains all the elements of modern learning? Modern learning has been so drawn into a score of consequences, has been so extended into a system of uses, that it is a sort of mirror held up to life itself, and the man of affairs now seeks in the laboratory, in the quiet places of counsel, from the scholar, those main elements which shall guide him in accomplishing the particular material tasks which lie immediately under his hand. ”

“ Finally, I shall discuss intellectual education, its aims, its curriculum, and its possibilities, from the first lessons in reading and writing to the end of the university years. The further education which men and women derive from life and the world I shall regard as lying outside my scope; but to make men and women capable of learning from experience should be one of the aims which early education should keep most prominently in view. ”

“ For certain of the younger and more exuberant seats of learning today, as compared with what may be most nearly comparable in the academic situation of the eighties, the proportion is perhaps twice as large as the larger figure named above. ”

“ And thus there seems no escape from the admission that what we fondly call our great seats of learning are simply "boarding schools" for bigger boys; that learned men are not more numerous in them than out of them; that the advancement of knowledge is not the object of fellows of colleges; that, in the philosophic calm and meditative stillness of their greenswarded courts, philosophy does not thrive, and meditation bears few fruits. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the fourth place, the plan carries out throughout the school life the educational truth that learning can only come through doing. The habits and attitudes of careful scientific observation, or purposeful interesting activity which is neither work nor play, the social, democratic, and coöperative background which such a school cultivates, are exactly the qualities we need for our younger generation in American society. ”

“ This problem will be treated in considerable detail when we come to consider the study lesson.
Pupils at work forming habits of thought, feeling, and action; acquiring knowledge of nature and of society; forming ideals which make for social well-being; and learning in all of this work to act independently, to function in the society of which they are a part: this is education, and these are the goals which we should strive to achieve every day and every hour that we teach. ”

“ I might speak of his quickening influence on one body of men—five hundred strong—assembled in one of our newer institutions of learning. But that influence extends far beyond those who stand in institutions of learning. ”

“ They give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results. ”

“ In speaking of his own experience at school, he says, "I was continually full of thoughts for the finding out of some means whereby more might be inflamed with the love of learning, and whereby learning itself might be made more compendious, both in the matter of charge and cost, and of labor belonging thereto, that so the youth might be brought by a more easy method unto some notable proficiency in learning." ”

“ The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view, as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom. ”

“ They taught the necessity of trained teachers, and developed a remarkable power and tact in the work of instruction and school management.
6. They made use of emulation as a means of stimulating ambition,—a principle that tends to arouse the baser motives, and which is therefore to be used guardedly.
7. They were indefatigable in missionary enterprise, and zealous in the propagation of their principles, both religious and educational.
[Pg 189] 8. They stimulated authorship, advanced learning, and produced many great men. ”

“ The Ideal school, most precisely representative of the present age—the age of science—is dedicated to a homogeneous system of mental and manual training, to the generation of power, to the development of true manhood. ”

“ For it assumed that the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education—or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. ”

“ Those, therefore, who from tender years receive instruction in the various forms of learning, recognize the same stamp on all the arts, and an intercourse between all studies, and so they more readily comprehend them all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the old Ages, when Universities and Schools were first instituted, this function of the schoolmaster, to teach mere speaking, was the natural one. In those healthy times, guided by silent instincts and the monition of Nature, men had from of old been used to teach themselves what it was essential to learn, by the one sure method of learning anything, practical apprenticeship to it. This was the rule for all classes; as it now is the rule, unluckily, for only one class. ”

“ In an ideal University, as I conceive it, a man should be able to obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge, and discipline in the use of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained. In such a University the force of living example should fire the student with a noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. And the very air he breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning; ”

“ This is the very essence of education, its informing spirit. The student no longer thinks merely of becoming an expert turner; he thinks of becoming a man! All the powers of his mind are roused to vigorous action; imagination illumes the path, and reason, following with firm but cautious step, drives straight to the mark. Rapid development results from the combination of practice with theory—rapid because orderly, or natural. ”

“ Education. No school? You have visited the hardest school in the world, the school ruled by the sternest teacher in the world—the School of Experience. Fortunate are they who learn from the experience of the past and the experience of others.
As Education speaks, her light is cast for a moment on the tax paper. Any City glances at the paper and tries to conceal it. With a beckoning gesture Education leads him again behind the curtain. ”

“ The long life and the enviable record of this Society of Pedagogy testify in themselves to that spirit of free inquiry, to the calm and dispassionate search for the truth which lies at the basis of the scientific method. You have gathered here, fortnight after fortnight, to discuss educational problems in the light of your experience. You have reported your experience and listened to the results that others have gleaned in the course of their daily work. And experience is the corner stone of science. ”

“ The power of the student to think independently, to digest the facts he has absorbed into some current theory which enables him to absorb more, and thus continually upbuild and rebuild his science, should be uninterruptedly stimulated by lectures, conferences and reading. ”

“ The school lesson would feed the mind, while the thorough, patient and conscientious acquisition of it would gymnaze the intellect and strengthen the moral force. Why have one class of studies for discipline only, and another class for nourishment only, when there are studies which at once fill the mind with the materials of thinking, and develop the power of thought,—which, at the same time, impart useful knowledge, and afford an intellectual gymnastic? ”

“ These, then, are the general ideas with which we must set out in discussing a curriculum:—Life as divided into several kinds of activity of successively decreasing importance; the worth of each order of facts as regulating these several kinds of activity, intrinsically, quasi-intrinsically, and conventionally; and their regulative influences estimated both as knowledge and discipline.
Happily, that all-important part of education which goes to secure direct self-preservation, is in great part already provided for. Too momentous to be left to our blundering, Nature takes it into her own hands. ”

“ With or without teaching, they could perform the work which no university can safely neglect, the work of constantly testing the soundness of our intellectual food, and of steadily expanding the realms of knowledge. ”

“ I found that the intelligence which results from a fair school education, sharpened by a subsequent taste for reading, very much heightened in certain items the standard by which my comrades regulated their conduct. Mere intelligence formed no guard amongst them against intemperance or licentiousness ”

“ One more prejudice of those imputed to realistic instruction must still be pointed out, and it will be the last. It is one of those time-worn devices whose history, extending over a thousand years, reflects the entire life of the school—the composition. ”

“ The more special distinction of the school, as compared with relations of authority in general, is resolvable into its main object—instruction, for which the condition that needs to be imposed is attention and application of mind, with a view to permanent intellectual and other impressions. To evoke, charm, cajole, compel this attitude, is the first aim in all teaching. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our instruction is adapted to the same end; we do not instruct them in studies above their rank in life; reading, writing, the elementary principles of arithmetic, geography, some of the natural sciences, and music, comprise the course of study. In the calling they select, we do what we can to make them intelligent and competent. ”

“ The Modern School, which seeks to form free minds, with a sense of responsibility, fitted to experience a complete development of their powers, which is the one aim of life, must necessarily adopt a very different kind of reading-book, in harmony with its method of teaching. ”

“ But limited though they be, where is the country to which these discoveries do not extend, or what, the mind not utterly barren and opake that they have not enlightened and improved?
They are heard on the sea, they are seen on the land; and though not so obvious, their impress is as palpable upon the schools. They work in a circle. In the schools they begin, to the schools they return. Improvements in education gave rise to the spirit of research, of discovery, and invention, which now pervades the world. Action and re-action are reciprocals. ”

“ Always sit or stand where you can all the while see the face of every pupil. I have, hundreds of times, seen the whole character of the instruction and discipline of a class changed by the observance of this simple rule. ”

“ at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching — that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to. ”

“ The principle however, is applicable to all; and one such experiment, dexterously carried through, will do more towards giving boys and girls, clear and practical ideas of the reason why they go to school, and of the importance of acquiring knowledge, than the best lecture on such a subject, which ever was delivered.
There is no branch of study attended to in school, which may, by judicious efforts, be made more effectual in accomplishing this object,—leading the pupils to see the practical utility, and the value of knowledge, than composition. ”

“ What is the significance of our definition in application to reading, writing, mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing, physics, chemistry, modern and foreign languages, and so on? Let us recur to two of the points made earlier in our discussion. The educator's part in the enterprise of education is to furnish the environment which stimulates responses and directs the learner's course. In last analysis, all that the educator can do is modify stimuli so that response will as surely as is possible result in the formation of desirable intellectual and emotional dispositions. ”