QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you explain the long-continued objection to teacher-training?
2. Contrast "oral and objective teaching" with the former "individual instruction."
3. Show how complete a change in classroom procedure this involved.
4. Show how Pestalozzian ideas necessitated a "technique of instruction."
5. Why is it that Pestalozzian ideas as to language and arithmetic instruction have so slowly influenced the teaching of grammar, language, and arithmetic?
6. How do you explain the decline in importance of the once-popular mental arithmetic?
7. Show how child study was a natural development from the Pestalozzian psychology and methodology.
8. Explain what is meant by the statements that Herbart rejected: (a) The conventional-social ideal of Locke. (b) The unsocial ideal of Rousseau. (c) The "faculty-psychology" conception of Pestalozzi.
9. Explain what is meant by saying that Herbart conceived of education as broadly social, rather than personal.
10. Show in what ways and to what extent Herbart: (a) Enlarged our conception of the educational process. (b) Improved the instruction content and process.
11. Explain why Herbartian ideas took so much more quickly in the United States than did Pestalozzianism.
12. State the essentials of the kindergarten idea, and the psychology behind it.
13. State the contribution of the kindergarten idea to education.
14. Show the connection between the sense impression ideas of Pestalozzi, the self-activity of Froebel, and the manual activities of the modern elementary school.
15. Explain why scientific studies came into the schools so slowly, up to about 1860, and so very rapidly after about that time.
16. Explain the particularly long resistance to the introduction of scientific studies by industrial England.
17. State the comparative importance of content and drill in education.
18. Does the reasoning of Herbert Spencer appeal to you as sound? If not, why not?
19. Show how the argument of Spencer for the study of science was also an argument for a more general diffusion of educational advantages.
20. Would schools have advanced in importance as they have done had the industrial revolution not taken place? Why?
21. Why is more extended education called for as "industrial life becomes more diversified, its parts narrower, and its processes more concealed"?
22. Point out the social significance of the educational work of John Dewey.
23. Point out the value, in the new order of society, of each group of school subjects listed in footnote 1 on page 763.
24. Contrast the virtues of a school before Pestalozzi's time and those of a modern school.