Education, therefore, in Dewey's conception, involves not merely learning, but play, construction, use of tools, contact with nature, expression, and activity; and the school should be a place where children are working rather than listening, learning life by living life, and becoming acquainted with social institutions and industrial processes by studying them. The work of the school is in large part to reduce the complexity of modern life to such terms as children can understand, and to introduce the child to modern life through simplified experiences. Its primary business may be said to be to train children in coöperative and mutually helpful living. The virtues of a school, as Dewey points out, are learning by doing; the use of muscles, sight and feeling, as well as hearing; and the employment of energy, originality, and initiative. The virtues of the school in the past were the colorless, negative virtues of obedience, docility, and submission. Mere obedience and the careful performance of imposed tasks he holds to be not only a poor preparation for social and industrial efficiency, but a poor preparation for democratic society and government as well. Responsibility for good government, under any democratic form of organization, rests with all, and the school should prepare for the political life of to-morrow by training its pupils to meet responsibilities, developing initiative, awakening social insight, and causing each to shoulder a fair share of the work of government in the school.
We have now before us the great contributions to a philosophy for the educational process made since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many other workers in different lands, but more particularly in German lands, France, Italy, England, and the United States, have added their labors to the expansion and redirection of the school. They are too numerous to mention and, though often nationally important, need not be included here. Still more, the contributions of Pestalozzi, Herbart, Froebel, Spencer, Dewey, and their followers and disciples are so interwoven in the educational theory and practice of to-day that it is in most cases impossible to separate them from one another. [39]
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you explain the long-continued objection to teacher-training?
2. Contrast "oral and objective teaching" with the former "individual instruction."
3. Show how complete a change in classroom procedure this involved.
4. Show how Pestalozzian ideas necessitated a "technique of instruction."
5. Why is it that Pestalozzian ideas as to language and arithmetic instruction have so slowly influenced the teaching of grammar, language, and arithmetic?
6. How do you explain the decline in importance of the once-popular mental arithmetic?
7. Show how child study was a natural development from the Pestalozzian psychology and methodology.