The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

V. THE SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION

An important recent development in the field of public education, and in a sense an outgrowth of all the preceding recent development which we have described, has been the organization of collegiate and university instruction in the history, theory, practice, and administration of education. Still more recent has been the organization of Teachers' Colleges and Schools of Education to give advanced training in educational research and in the solution of the practical problems of school organization and administration. So important has this recent development become that no history of educational progress would be complete without at least a brief mention of this recent attempt to give scientific organization to the educational process.

EARLY BEGINNERS. Though the teachers' seminaries had been organized in Germany and other northern lands toward the close of the eighteenth century, the normal school in France early in the nineteenth, and the training-college in England and the normal school in the United States by the close of the first third of that century, the work in these remained for a long time almost entirely academic in nature and elementary in character. This was also true of the superior normal school for training teachers for the lycées of France.

The reason for this is easy to find. The writings of the earlier educational reformers were little known; the contributions of Herbart and Froebel had not as yet been popularized; there was no organized psychology of the educational process, and no psychology better than that of John Locke; the detailed Pestalozzian procedure had not as yet been worked out in the form of teaching technique; the history of the development of educational theory or of educational practice had not been written; and almost no philosophy of the educational purpose had been formulated which could be used in the training-schools. In consequence the training of teachers, both for elementary and secondary instruction, [22] was almost entirely in academic subjects, with some talks on school-keeping and class organization and management added, and at times a little philosophy as to educational work, such as habit-formation, morality, thinking, and the training of the will. Educational journalism did not begin in either Europe or America until near the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and it was 1850 before it attained any significance, and 1840 to 1850 before any important pedagogical literature arose. [23]

[Illustration: FIG. 238. KARL GEORG VON RAUMER (1783-1865)]

NEW INFLUENCE. In 1843 there appeared, in Germany, the first two volumes of a very celebrated and influential History of Education, by a professor of mineralogy in the University of Erlangen, by the name of Karl Gcorg von Raumer. As a young man in Paris (1808-09), studying the great mineral collections found there, he read and was deeply stirred by Fichte's "Address to the German Nation" (p. 567). As a result he went to Yverdon, in 1809, and spent some months in studying the work in Pestalozzi's Institute. This interest in education he never lost, and thereafter, as professor of mineralogy at Halle and Erlangen, he also gave lectures on pedagogy (Uber Pädagogik). The outgrowth of these lectures was his four- volume History of Pedagogy from the Revival of Classical Studies to our own Time. [24] The work was done with characteristic German thoroughness, and for long served as a standard organization and text on the history of the development of educational theory and practice since the days of the Revival of Learning. The work of von Raumer stimulated many to a study of the writings of the earlier educational reformers, and numerous books and papers on educational history and theory soon began to appear. Most important, for American students, was Henry Barnard's monumental American Journal of Education, begun in 1855, and continued for thirty-one years. This is a great treasure-house of pedagogical literature for American educators.

After 1850 the organization of a technique of instruction for the elementary-school subjects took place rapidly, in the normal schools of all lands, as it had earlier in the German teachers' seminaries. By 1868 the study of the new Herbartian psychology and educational theory was well under way in Germany, and by 1890 in the United States. By 1875 the kindergarten, with its new theory of child life, was also beginning to make itself felt in both Europe and America. Between 1850 and 1875 Weber, Lotze, Fechner, and Wundt laid the foundations for a new psychology (R. 357), and in 1878 Wundt opened the first laboratory for the experimental study of psychology at the University of Leipzig. In 1890 William James published his two-volume work on Principles of Psychology, a book so original and lucid in treatment that it at once gave a new teaching organization to modern psychology. After about 1880, the extension of education upward and outward in the United States, and the rapid development of state school systems which had by that time begun, began to make new demands for better scientific and legal and administrative organization, and this gave rise to a new type of educational literature.

After von Raumer's work, probably the greatest single stimulative influence of the mid-nineteenth century was that exerted by the marked successes of the Prussian armies in a series of short but very decisive wars. Against Denmark (1864) and Austria (1866), but in particular in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the Prussian armies proved irresistible. These military operations attracted new attention to education, and "the Prussian schoolmaster has triumphed" became a common world saying. This, coupled with the remarkable national development of United Germany which almost immediately set in, caused progressive nations to turn to the study of education with increased interest. The English and Scottish universities now began to establish lectureships in the theory and history of education, [25] and the first university chairs in education in the United States were founded.

THE UNIVERSITY STUDY OF EDUCATION. In no country in the world have the universities, within the past three decades, given the attention to the study of Education—a term that in English-speaking lands has replaced the earlier and more limited "Pedagogy"—that has been given in the United States. [26] After the United States the newer universities of England probably come next. Up to 1890 less than a dozen chairs of education had been established in all the colleges of the United States, and their work was still largely limited to historical and philosophical studies of education, and to a type of classroom methodology and school management, since almost entirely passed over to the normal schools. By 1920 there were some four hundred colleges in the United States giving serious courses on educational history and procedure and administration, many of them maintaining large and important professional Schools of Education for the more scientific study of the subject, and for the training of leaders for the service of the nation's schools.

In the great advances which have taken place in the organization of education, during these three decades, no institution in the world has exerted a more important influence than has "Teachers College," Columbia University, in the City of New York, which was organized in 1887 as "The New York College for the Training of Teachers," but since 1890 has been affiliated with Columbia University, under its present name. This institution has been a model copied by many others over the world; has trained a large percentage of the leaders in education in the United States; and has been particularly influential with students from England, the English self-governing dominions, China, and South America.

To-day, in all the state universities and in many non-state institutions in the United States, we find well-organized Teachers' Colleges engaged in a work which two decades ago was being attempted by but a few institutions anywhere, In the municipal universities of England, in Canada, in Japan and China, and in other democratic lands, we find the beginnings of a similar development of the scientific study of education. In these Schools or Colleges for the scientific study of education the best thinking on the problems of the reorganization and administration of education, and the most new and creative work, has been and is being done. [27]

THE PROBLEMS OF THE PRESENT. Pestalozzi dreamed that he might be able to psychologize instruction and reduce all to an orderly procedure, which, once learned, would make one a master teacher. What he was not able to accomplish he died thinking others after him would do. The problem of education has had, with time, no such simple and easy solution. Instead, with the development of state school systems, the extension of education in many new directions to meet new needs, and the application to the study of education of the same scientific methods which have produced such results in other fields of human knowledge, we have come to-day to have hundreds of problems, many of which are complex and difficult and which influence deeply the welfare of society and the State. That these problems, even with time, will receive any such simple solution as that of which Pestalozzi dreamed, may well be doubted. In the days of church control, memoriter instruction, and a school for religious ends, education was a simple matter; to-day it partakes of the difficulty and complexity which characterize most of the problems of modern world States. In consequence of this important change in the character of education a great number of important problems in educational organization, practice, and procedure now face us for solution.

Space can here be taken to mention only the more prominent of these present-day educational problems. On the administrative side is a whole group of problems relating to forms of organization: the proper educational relationships between the State and its subordinate units; the development of a state educational policy: the types of instruction the State must provide, and compel attendance upon; questions of taxation and support, compulsory attendance, and child labor; the training and oversight of teachers for the service of the State; problems of child health and welfare; the provision of adequate and professional supervision; the provision of continuation schools, and of industrial and vocational training; the supervision of school buildings for health and sanitary control; and the relation of the State to private and parochial education. The problem of how to produce as effective and as thorough education for leadership with a one-class school system as with a two- class; the opening-up of opportunity for youth of brains in any social class to rise and be trained for service; the selection and proper training of those of superior intelligence; the elimination of barriers to the advancement of children of large intellectual endowment; and what best to do with those of small intellectual capacity, form another important group of present-day educational problems. Vocational training and technical education, and the relation and the proper solution of these questions to national happiness and prosperity and human welfare, form still another important group. The many questions which hinge upon instruction; the elimination of useless subject-matter; the best organization of instruction; proper aims and ends; moral and civic training; the most economical organization of school work; the saving of time; and what are desirable educational reorganizations, all these form a group of instructional problems of large significance for the future of public education. Still more in detail, but of large importance, are the questions relating to the scientific measurement of the results of instruction; the erection of attainable goals in teaching; and the introduction of scientific accuracy into educational work. Still another important group of problems relates to the readjustment of inherited school organization and practices, the better to meet the changed and changing conditions of national life—social, industrial, political, religious, economic, scientific—brought about by the industrial and social and scientific and political revolutions which have taken place.

These represent some of the more important new problems in education which have come to challenge us since the school was taken over from the Church and transformed into the great constructive tool of the State. Their solution will call for careful investigation, experimentation, and much clear thinking, and before they are solved other new problems will arise. So probably it will ever be under a democratic form of government; only in autocratic or strongly monarchical forms of government, where the study of problems of educational organization and adjustment are not looked upon with favor, can a school system to-day remain for long fixed in type or uniform in character. Education to-day has become intricate and difficult, requiring careful professional training on the part of those who would exercise intelligent control, and so intimately connected with national strength and national welfare that it may be truthfully said to have become, in many respects, the most important constructive undertaking of a modern State.