The connection of this problem with the one discussed in the last chapter is not difficult to trace. Where a community is small and has few children, a one-room building will serve to house the school. Economy dictates the employment of a single teacher. This one teacher must divide his or her time as best possible in giving instruction to pupils some of whom are very young and others of whom are more mature. On the other hand, where the community is large or where the school is consolidated, a many-room building is required, and the lines of division between groups are drawn in a fashion quite impossible in the one-room school.
Economy a First Motive for Grouping
Some of the simplest motives back of the grouping of pupils into classes are financial. Instruction can be administered economically to a number of pupils when it would be prohibitively expensive to provide a teacher for each learner. Indeed, the demand for large classes in city schools becomes so urgent that it is often necessary to point out the danger of carrying economy so far that it will defeat the purposes of instruction.
Social Influence an Important Motive
On the other hand, it can be shown that even where the motive of economy is not pressing, there are valid educational grounds for grouping pupils into classes. Pupils help each other through their natural social relations. The wholesome rivalry and mutual suggestiveness provided by the class furnish a much better atmosphere for teaching than does the isolation of individual instruction.
Somewhere between the huge class dictated by economy and the small class diminishing to a single individual is the ideal group in point of size for successful teaching.
Grouping in the One-Room School
There are other characteristics than size, however, to be considered in making up proper groups. In order to discover some of these characteristics, it will be well to consider certain concrete types of grouping exhibited in schools.
The type of grouping in the one-room, one-teacher school is in many respects the freest which can be found. The teacher can organize the school with no conflicts in program, because the whole program consists in distributing his own time. The classes can be of any size that the teacher’s judgment determines. The reasons for the grouping are purely and simply those which appeal to the teacher.
Under such circumstances what happens? The teacher naturally puts in one group the pupils who are for the first time taking up school work. In other groups he puts those pupils who have approximately the same attainments in each subject. In the classes beyond the first many complications arise. There are some pupils who read well but seem to be deficient in knowledge of number. Other pupils with a taste for arithmetic are very forward in that branch and do only indifferently well in reading and spelling. It is not uncommon in the one-room school for the teacher to regard these differences in ability in particular subjects as adequate reasons for distributing the pupils differently in different subjects. It comes about in the course of time that one and the same pupil will be in the third reading class, in the fourth geography class, and in the fifth or sixth class in arithmetic, while another pupil who has attained to the fifth reader will be lingering behind in the third class in arithmetic.