Necessity of Practical Decisions in Spite of Confusion
With the expansions in education that have been reviewed in foregoing chapters, there has come a certain confusion and uncertainty of practice which sometimes tends to lower the standards of work in the school.
Consider a concrete case. A small city can afford to offer only a limited number of courses in its high school. Shall the choice fall on Latin or typewriting? Among the sciences shall botany or chemistry be provided? Botany would relate itself well to agriculture, and chemistry would be a basis for domestic science. Sometimes in the effort to meet both demands, weak courses are tolerated, and teachers are either overloaded because they are called on to carry heavy programs or are inadequately compensated in the effort to provide a sufficient number to do all the work demanded.
Nor is it the school alone which is confronted with the necessity of choosing; the individual student must elect. There is a high school in a small city in Illinois, as shown by the last report of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, which enrolled in 1915 four hundred and sixty-one students. This school offered twenty-three units in academic subjects and twelve units in vocational subjects. If each pupil took five units a year, which would be a very heavy program, he would be able to complete in four years only twenty units, or fifteen less than the school offers. Another high school in the same state with an enrollment of five hundred and thirty-two students offers an aggregate of forty-four units.
Finally, there are choices to be made within these choices, because after the decision has been reached that botany is to be taught, the teacher must select from the abundant material within this science that which seems most productive. The student, also, gives more attention to one subject than to the others which he is pursuing, thus exhibiting another kind of selection.
Choices have to be made, and every choice has back of it some prejudice or some clearly thought-out principle or some experience collected by the teacher or pupil through contact with earlier educational problems. Our business in this course is, first, to become aware of the chief reasons for the choices actually made in schools, and, second, to take up some of the evidences which justify one or the other of these reasons. The present chapter will be devoted to a brief statement of the principles most commonly urged as the basis of choice.