In the University of Missouri there are two distinct courses, elementary and advanced. The elementary course corresponds very much to a Normal School course. The subjects for the first year’s study are chiefly English, algebra, physiology, zoology, botany, physical geography, rhetoric. In the second year, pedagogics, including applied psychology, history and school organization, are taken up with history, literature, physics, chemistry and civil government. Drawing and elocution are required subjects during all but one term of the course. The certificate at the end of the elementary course qualifies the holder to teach for two years in any public school of the State. The advanced course leads on to the degree of bachelor of pedagogics. The required work in this department may be taken by students who are preparing for degrees in other courses, or by those who have already a degree conferred by this or any approved University. The graduate students may, by selecting four of the offered subjects, and devoting five hours a week to the pedagogical work, complete the course in one year. Others, take certain prescribed courses, and certain optional courses in pedagogics, during the third and fourth years of their ordinary graduate work. The degree entitles to a life-certificate to teach in any of the public schools of the State. It is noticeable, in connection with the prescribed courses in this University, that the study of education, historically, comes before the consideration of theory or philosophy of education and its application in school work. The elective or optional studies are four—viz., school systems of Europe; school systems of the cities and States of the United States; the educational theories of Herbert Spencer; the philosophy of Froebel.
Of the other State Universities, some make pedagogics a complete course for graduates or undergraduates, while some, as at Missouri, make it an elective study during the third and fourth years of an ordinary graduate course. Where two complete courses exist—an elementary and an advanced—in the same department, the distinction is based chiefly on the difference of qualification needed for admission. Students qualified to enter the University may pursue the elementary course; only those of the third year or fourth year, or graduates, may take up the advanced course. As a rule, the students of the elementary course teach in the Primary or Grammar Schools, those of the advanced courses become teachers of secondary schools and colleges.
The State Universities of America, as a whole, follow, more or less strictly, the lines of German Universities. This is not only so as regards organization merely, but as regards methods of study, and lines of thought. In no department is the German influence more seen than in that of pedagogics, where methods of the German “Seminar” are increasingly used and valued by professors and advanced students. Few State Universities having pedagogical departments would be found which had not begun to use Seminar methods. In many Universities, a “Seminar room,” in which is a pedagogical reference library, is set apart especially for research and conference in matters educational. A natural accompaniment of these methods is much study of German pedagogical theory, and a constant tendency to emphasize and elaborate German lines of thought. The two great Schools in American psychology to-day, both of which are making rapid strides in progress, and influencing the whole of American education to an important extent, are the Herbartians and the Experimental Psychologists. Both had their beginnings in German Universities.
The most modern feature of German University Departments of Pedagogy is, however, one which has not yet been adopted by American State Universities. A means of connection between the theoretical and practical sides of training, by the establishment of a practising school attached to the University, has been made at Jena for some time. Such a connection would be of the greatest value to American State University Departments, but until now actual practical departments have not existed. The instruction in university departments of pedagogy, although such as to be of the greatest possible value and stimulation as a theoretical basis for teaching and organizing in secondary schools, is however incomplete unless opportunities are also supplied of gaining actual experience in teaching. A practising school, organized as a part of the University, and having as its principal one of the University Faculty, might, besides affording such a practising ground for secondary teachers, be the means of supplying tested facts to the teaching world in general, and would greatly help the University Department to fulfil its true function—that of stimulating teachers and unifying education in the State.
University Departments of Pedagogy in the Eastern States.
The study of pedagogy in connection with the universities and colleges of the Eastern States is a department of work of comparatively recent origin. The conservative attitude of the older Universities, such as Harvard and Yale, with regard to the recognition of the claims of pedagogy to be a science, and the needs of distinctly professional instruction for those who intend to become teachers in higher schools and colleges, has resulted in the fact that the training of secondary teachers has, until a few years ago, been almost entirely restricted to the Western State Universities. It is remarkable, however, that since the older educational institutions of the Eastern States have recognised education as a science, rapid progress has been made, and one finds on surveying the work of university departments of pedagogy as a whole certain features which, when further developed, will possibly cause university instruction to be the most valuable means of training secondary teachers. Among such lines of work, already begun in these pedagogical departments, are:
i. Supervision of secondary school work.
ii. Stimulation of all teachers by research work in educational matters.
iii. The acknowledgment by scientific workers in the field of pedagogy and psychology of the results of teachers’ observations of children in the school-room, as helpful to the scientific researches of the laboratory.
iv. Preparation and stimulation of professors of pedagogy, and of teachers for higher schools and colleges.