The Children: Some Educational Problems

by Alexander Darroch

In a similar manner, the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties of language construction occupied the major portion of the attention of the child during the school period, and the function of language in conveying a knowledge of things and persons and events received but a small share of his attention. Meanings of words were indeed tabulated and learnt by heart, and as a rule the child on examination-day could make a fair show in deluding the inspector that the passage read was intelligently apprehended. In very much the same way, the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties of writing and the drilling of the child to form his letters in a uniform style received the chief share of the school-time devoted to the subject.

The interest and attention of the child having been thus mainly occupied in the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties involved in the learning of the three grant-earning subjects, and little attention having been paid to the use of these arts, it followed that upon the conclusion of the school period the child left the school without any real interests having been established as the result of the educative process.

Moreover, except in so far as by their teaching we may establish habits of order and of accuracy, the three elementary subjects in themselves possess no moral or social intent; hence unless we can make the child realise their value as instruments for the attainment of ends of social worth they in themselves fail to play any important part in the building up of character.

Let me put this in another way. We have defined education as the process of acquiring and systematising experiences that will render future action more efficient, or alternatively it is the process by which we organise and establish in the mind systems of ideas for the attainment of ends. But if we make the acquisition of these elementary arts ends in themselves, then it follows that the more efficient action we seek to realise is the more efficient manipulation of a number system or a language system. If, however, we realise that these arts are but means to the realisation of other ends, then we shall understand that it is the character of the latter which mainly determines the resulting character of the education given.

Partly to this erroneous conception of the real function of the elementary arts, and partly to another cause which we shall mention later, may be attributed the poor results which our Elementary School system has attained in the establishment of interests of moral and social worth. If, moreover, we realise how large a proportion of the children left and still do leave school at an early age, before such interests can be permanently established, and in some cases with anything but an adequate knowledge of the elementary arts necessary for all further progress, we may rather be astonished that so much has been done than so little.

But in the reaction against the narrowness and formalism of our early aims in elementary education, there is a tendency—a strong tendency—at the present time to go to the opposite extreme, and to make the elementary instrumental arts the vehicles for the fostering of real interests at too early a stage. This manifests itself on the one hand in the desire to make all instruction interesting to the child, and on the other to introduce the child prematurely to a knowledge of the real conditions of life, before he can have any intelligent understanding of these conditions. From the barrenness and formalism of the earlier period, we now have the demand made that the school should throughout take into account the real and practical necessities of life.

The former tendency—the tendency to make everything interesting to the child by lessening or minimising the mechanical difficulties and by endeavouring in every way to incite the child to become interested in the content of the lesson—is best exemplified by the character of the school books which we now place in the hands of our children. The latter tendency—the tendency to the premature use of the elementary arts—is exemplified by the craving to make our teaching of arithmetic practical and real from the very beginning.

In the former case, instead of endeavouring to make the process of language construction interesting in itself, we divert the child's attention from the acquiring and organising of the system of language forms to the premature acquirement of the content of language. What results is obvious: the main interest being in the content, the interest in the mechanical construction of the form suffers, and as a consequence the child never attains a full mastery over the instrumental art.

In the latter case we attempt to do two things at the same time in our teaching of arithmetic. In every concrete application of arithmetic there are two interests involved: in the first place, there is the number interest—the interest in the analysing and recombining of a group, undertaken for the sake of the reconstruction itself; in the second place, there is the business or real interest, which the number interest indeed subserves, but the two interests are in no case identical. If we attempt to teach the two together, we as a rule teach both badly. The pupil will have but a hazy idea of the business relation, and will run the risk of imperfectly organising the pure number system. Hence all kinds of impossible problems may be given to the child without raising any suspicion of error in his mind, and such cases furnish certain evidence that the business relation does not really concern him, but that his whole attention is engaged with the purely constructive aspect of number. Another example of the same error of confounding two separate things is the "blind mixture we make of arithmetic and measuring." Because arithmetic is involved in all measuring we assume that when the child can add together feet and inches, therefore he has a complete knowledge of these spatial magnitudes. But manifestly, if spatial magnitude is to be taught intelligently, it must at first be taught independently of the number relation, which is a general system instrumental in the realisation of many concrete interests.

From these considerations, certain general results follow. On the one hand, the earlier conception of the aim of the Primary School as being mainly concerned with the acquirement and organisation of the three elementary arts as ends in themselves must be condemned. Language and number systems are means to the realisation of certain concrete ends of after-life, and the school during the later stages of education must endeavour to lead the child to perceive how these systems may be utilised in the furtherance of these real concrete interests. On the other hand, the attempt to combine prematurely these two aims will result in the imperfect attainment of both. During the earlier stages of education the main interest must be in the construction for its own sake of the language system or the number system, and while the real interest may be introduced it must always be kept subsidiary to the main interest—must first of all be taught for its own sake, and the instrumental art only used for its furtherance in so far as the acquirement of the former is not obstructed. E.g., the placing of geography and history Readers in the hands of the child while he is still struggling with the difficulties of language construction can only result in the history and geography being imperfectly understood and the organisation of the language system being delayed and hindered.