Barnard, Henry. National Education in Europe.
* Bowen, H. C. Froebel and Education through Self-Activity.
Compayré, G. Herbart and Education by Instruction.
* De Garmo, Chas. Herbart and the Herbartians.
Dewey, John. The School and Social Progress. (Nine numbers.)
* Dewey, John. The School and Society.
Gordy, J. P. Rise and Growth of the Normal School Idea in the United
States. Circular of Information, United States Bureau of
Education, No. 8, 1891.
Hollis, A. P. The Oswego Movement.
* Jordan, D. S. "Spencer's Essay on Education"; in Cosmopolitan
Magazine, vol. xxix, pp. 135-49. (Sept. 1902.)
Judd, C. H. The Training of Teachers in England, Scotland, and
Germany. (Bulletin 35, 1914, United States Bureau of Education.)
Monroe, Will S. History of the Pestalozzian Movement in the United
States.
* Parker, S. C. History of Modern Elementary Education.
Ping Wen Kuo. The Chinese System of Public Education.
Spencer, Herbert. Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical.
Vanderwalker, N. C. The Kindergarten in American Education.
CHAPTER XXIX
NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS
I. POLITICAL
THE ENLARGED CONCEPTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION. The new ideas as to the purpose and functions of the State promulgated by English and French eighteenth-century thinkers, and given concrete expression in the American and French revolutions near the close of the century, imparted, as we have seen, a new meaning to the school and a new purpose to the education of a people. In the theoretical discussion of education by Rousseau and the empirical work of Pestalozzi a new individualistic theory for a secular school was created, and this Prussia, for long moving in that direction, first adopted as a basis for the state school system it early organized to serve national ends. The new American States, also long moving toward state organization and control, early created state schools to replace the earlier religious schools; while the French Revolution enthusiasts abolished the religious school and ordered the substitution of a general system of state schools to serve their national ends.
From these beginnings, as we have seen, the state-school idea has in course of time spread to all continents, and nations everywhere to-day have come to feel that the maintenance of a more or less comprehensive system of state schools is so closely connected with national welfare and progress as to be a necessity for the State (R. 367). In consequence, state ministries for education have been created in all the important world nations; state and local school officials have been provided generally to see that the state purpose in creating schools is carried out; state normal schools for the preparation of teachers have been established; comprehensive state school codes have been enacted or educational decrees formulated; and constantly increasing expenditures for education are to-day derived by taxing the wealth of the State to educate the children of the State.
CHANGE FROM THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE. The original purpose in the establishment of schools by the State was everywhere to promote literacy and citizenship. Under all democratic forms of government it was also to insure to the people the elements of learning that they might be prepared for participation in the functions of government. [1] This is well expressed in the quotations given (p. 525) from early American statesmen as to the need for the education of public opinion and the diffusion of knowledge among the people. The same ideas were expressed by French writers and statesmen of the time, and by the English after the passage of the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 (p. 642). With the gradual extension of the franchise to larger and larger numbers of the people, the extension of educational advantages naturally had to follow. The education of new citizens for "their political and civil duties as members of society and freemen" became a necessity, and closely followed each extension of the right to vote. In all democratic governments the growing complexity of modern political society has since greatly enlarged these early duties of the school. To-day, in modern nations where general manhood suffrage has come to be the rule, and still more so in nations which have added female suffrage as well, the continually increasing complexity of the political, economic, and social problems upon which the voters are expected to pass judgment is such that a more prolonged period of citizenship education is necessary if voters are to exercise, in any intelligent manner, their functions of citizenship. In nations where the initiative, referendum, and recall have been added, the need for special education along political, economic, and social lines has been still further emphasized.
At first instruction in the common-school branches, with instruction in morals or religion added, was regarded as sufficient. In States, such as the German, where religious instruction was retained in the schools, this has been made a powerful instrument in moulding the citizenship and upholding the established order. The history of the different nations has also been used by each as a means for instilling desired conceptions of citizenship, and some work in more or less formal civil government has usually been added. To-day all these means have been proven inadequate for democratic peoples. In consequence, the work in civil government is being changed and broadened into institutional and community civics; the work of the elementary school is being socialized, along the lines advocated by Dewey; and instruction in economic principles and in the functions of government is being introduced into the secondary schools. Instead of being made mere teaching institutions, engaged in promoting literacy and diffusing the rudiments of learning among the electorate, schools are to- day being called upon to grasp the significance of their political and social relationships, and to transform themselves into institutions for improving and advancing the welfare of the State (R. 368).
THE PROMOTION OF NATIONALITY. In Prussia the promotion of national solidarity was early made an important aim of the school. This has in time become a common national purpose, as there has dawned upon statesmen generally the idea that a national spirit or culture is "an artificial product which transcends social, religious, and economic distinctions," and that it "could be manufactured by education" (R. 340). In consequence of this discovery the school has been raised to a new position of importance in the national life, and has become the chief means for developing in the citizenship that national unity and national strength so desirable under present-day world conditions. In the German States, where this function of the school has in recent times been perverted to carry forward imperialistic national ends (R. 342); in France, where it has been intelligently used to promote a rational type of national strength (R. 341); in Italy, where divergent racial types are being fused into a new national unity; in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines (R. 343) where the United States has used education to bring backward peoples up to a new level of culture, and to develop in them firm foundations of national solidarity; in China (R. 335) where an ancient people, speaking numerous dialects, is making the difficult transition from an old culture to the newer western civilization; and in Algiers and Morocco, where the spirit of French nationality is being fused into dark-skinned tribesmen— everywhere to-day, where public education has really taken hold on the national life, we find the school being used for the promotion of national solidarity and the inculcation of national ideals and national culture. To such an extent has this become true that practically all the pressing problems of the school to-day, in any land, find their ultimate explanation in terms of the new nineteenth-century conceptions of political nationality.
Since the development of world trade routes following long rail and steamship lines, along which people as well as raw materials and manufactured articles pass to and fro, the entrance of new and diverse peoples into distant national groups has created a new problem of nationalization that before the early nineteenth century was largely unknown. Previous to the nineteenth century the problem was confined almost entirely to peoples conquered and annexed by the fortunes of war. To-day it is a voluntary migration of peoples, and a migration of such proportions and from such distant and unlike civilizations that the problem of assimilating the foreigner has become, particularly in the English-speaking nations and colonies, to which distant and unrelated peoples have turned in largest numbers, [2] a serious national problem. The migration of 32,102,671 persons to the United States, between 1820 and 1914, from all parts of the world, has been a movement of peoples compared with which the migrations of the Germanic tribes—Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi, Danes, Burgundians, Huns—into the old Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries pale into insignificance. No such great movement of peoples was ever known before in history, and the assimilative power of the American nation has not been equal to the task. The World War revealed the extent of the failure to nationalize the foreigner who has been permitted to come, and brought the question of "Americanization" to the front as one of the most pressing problems connected with American national education. With the world in flux racially as it now is, the problem of the assimilation of non-native peoples is one which the schools of every nation which offers political and economic opportunity to other peoples must face. This has called for the organization of special classes in the schools, evening and adult instruction, community-center work, nationalization programs, compulsory attendance of children, state oversight of private and religious schools, and other forms of educational undertakings undreamed of in the days when the State first took over the schools from the Church the better to promote literacy and citizenship.