[48] “Scientific Common-school Education.”—Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November, 1880, p. 937.
The testimony of Col. Francis W. Parker, of the Cook County (Illinois) Normal School, is to the same effect. He says,
“The most important work of to-day is to collect, reconcile, and apply all the principles and methods of education that have been discovered in the past, into one science and art of teaching. This would certainly radically change all our school work in this country. When this is done the ground will be made ready for new advances in the incomplete science of education. Because a complete science has not yet been discovered is a very poor reason for not applying what we already know. What specific changes would the application of known mental laws, in teaching about which all psychologists are in agreement, bring about? For it is only by a sharp comparison of what is now done according to tradition and custom in our schools, with that which can be done by the application of the simplest principles of teaching, that the value of the true art of instruction may be in some degree appreciated.
“To illustrate this it may be mentioned that little children have been taught to read, in the past, and a great majority of them are now taught, by a method that is utterly opposed to a mental law, about which there can be no dispute among those who know anything of the science of teaching. I refer to the A B C method. Nearly three hundred years ago Comenius discovered a rule of teaching which may be said to embrace all rules in its category—‘Things that have to be done should be learned by doing them.’ This rule is so simple and plain that every one, except the teachers, has adopted and used it since man has lived upon the earth. If I am not very much mistaken, the school-master for the last fifty years has been incessantly inventing ways of doing things in the school-room by doing something else. We try to teach the English language by rules, definitions, analyses, diagrams, and parsing. Before the poor innocent child can write a single sentence correctly, we teach the painful pronunciation of words without the grasping of thought as reading. We vainly endeavor to give children a knowledge of number by teaching figures, the signs of number. We cram our victim’s mind full of empty, meaningless words, instead of inspiring and developing it by the sweet and strong realities of thought. This futile struggle to do things by doing something else is to-day costing the people of this country millions and millions of hard-earned dollars; and it is much to be feared that it will one day cost their children the blessings of free government. This is a serious charge.
“The three hundred thousand teachers of this country are as faithful, honest, and earnest as any other class of active workers. If, then, these great truths in education be at the doors of our educators, why do they not acquire and use them? The answer is not far to seek. Not one teacher in five hundred ever makes a practical, thorough study of the history of education, to say nothing of the science.
“The tremendous projecting power of tradition stands stubbornly in the way of progress in education. It can only be met and overcome by the most thorough searching and indefatigable study of the child’s nature, and of the means by which the possibilities for good in God’s greatest creation may be realized.”[49]
[49] Letter to the author under date of April, 1883, and by him reproduced in a communication published in the Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1883.
The change from automatic to scientific education ought not to be very difficult. It has been made in the kindergarten. It consists in substituting things in place of signs of things. The boys should be taught to read in school as he will be required to read; to write as he will be required to write; and to cipher as he will be required to cipher, when he becomes a man.
In teaching chemistry, for example, there should be a laboratory with the necessary illustrative apparatus. In teaching geography, in addition to the books and the globe, the form of the continent should be moulded in sand, with coast lines, mountain ranges, rivers, canals, harbors, cities, etc. In teaching number the pupil should have the things and parts of things, represented by signs, in his hands. In teaching mechanics the pupil should handle the saw, the plane, the file, the hammer, and the chisel, and stand at the bench, the forge, and the turning-lathe. It is in this way only that the pupil can be taught the power of expressing, as Mr. Clark puts it, “what has been absorbed on the receptive side.”
Mr. MacAlister illustrates the force of Mr. Clark’s diagrams in a sentence: “We must not close our eyes to the fact that by far the larger number of men in every civilized community are workers to whom a skilled hand is quite as important as a well filled head.”[50] The prevailing methods of teaching fill the head but do not provide for assimilation, re-creation, and expression. Now to assimilate, to reduce to practical value and put to use facts memorized, and to create, the power of expression is an essential prerequisite; creating is expressing ideas in concrete form. But under the old régime of education only two modes of expression are provided—speech and writing. A third mode—drawing—has been very generally adopted. Drawing, however, is only the first step, an incomplete step, so to speak, of expression. It is a sign, an outline, of a thing. What we want is the thing itself. That thing can only be produced at the forge, the bench, or the lathe; and this is manual training in the arts.