New Problems of Grouping in Large Schools
When schools grow to the size where pupils are put into different rooms, as in an eight-room building, a problem arises which was never faced in the one-room school. It is the problem of carrying a group of pupils through all the subjects at the same rate. Thus, when the pupils in an ordinary city school have been grouped together in arithmetic, there are obvious advantages from an administrative point of view in keeping them together in reading and in geography. In ordinary practice the graded school assumes that it is possible to find means of keeping the group together for long periods in all subjects.
This assumption leads to the necessity of asking a kind of question which did not confront the teacher in the one-room school. The kind of question which comes up in the graded school can be illustrated as follows: When a pupil is old enough and intellectually mature enough to study the products and industries of North America in his geography, what phase of arithmetic will be appropriate to hold his attention and stimulate his thinking? When a pupil is old enough to read the history of his own city, what other reading material will insure real effort on his part?
The one-room school escapes these questions for the most part because it is at liberty to allow the pupil to take a different pace in each subject. The one-room school is a place where the subjects of instruction taken in their totality, or the curriculum, as the whole series of subjects may be called, is usually not recognized as important. Each subject has a sequence of its own, but the curriculum as a whole is not thought out. In the graded school the curriculum is one of the matters of major importance. The graded school not only grades pupils; it grades subject-matter of instruction. The importance of this contrast cannot be overemphasized. Many of the problems of the modern school arise at this point.