The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

From mere medical inspection to detect contagious diseases, in which the movement everywhere began, it was next extended to tests for eyesight and hearing, to be made by teachers or physicians, and has since been enlarged to include physical examinations to detect hidden diseases and a constructive health-program for the schools. The work has now come to include eye, ear, nose, throat, and teeth, as well as general physical examinations; the supervision of the teaching of hygiene in the schools, and to a certain extent the physical training and playground activities; and a constructive program for the development of the health and physical welfare of all children. All this represents a further extension of the public-education idea.

V. THE SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION

An important recent development in the field of public education, and in a sense an outgrowth of all the preceding recent development which we have described, has been the organization of collegiate and university instruction in the history, theory, practice, and administration of education. Still more recent has been the organization of Teachers' Colleges and Schools of Education to give advanced training in educational research and in the solution of the practical problems of school organization and administration. So important has this recent development become that no history of educational progress would be complete without at least a brief mention of this recent attempt to give scientific organization to the educational process.

EARLY BEGINNERS. Though the teachers' seminaries had been organized in Germany and other northern lands toward the close of the eighteenth century, the normal school in France early in the nineteenth, and the training-college in England and the normal school in the United States by the close of the first third of that century, the work in these remained for a long time almost entirely academic in nature and elementary in character. This was also true of the superior normal school for training teachers for the lycées of France.

The reason for this is easy to find. The writings of the earlier educational reformers were little known; the contributions of Herbart and Froebel had not as yet been popularized; there was no organized psychology of the educational process, and no psychology better than that of John Locke; the detailed Pestalozzian procedure had not as yet been worked out in the form of teaching technique; the history of the development of educational theory or of educational practice had not been written; and almost no philosophy of the educational purpose had been formulated which could be used in the training-schools. In consequence the training of teachers, both for elementary and secondary instruction, [22] was almost entirely in academic subjects, with some talks on school-keeping and class organization and management added, and at times a little philosophy as to educational work, such as habit-formation, morality, thinking, and the training of the will. Educational journalism did not begin in either Europe or America until near the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and it was 1850 before it attained any significance, and 1840 to 1850 before any important pedagogical literature arose. [23]

[Illustration: FIG. 238. KARL GEORG VON RAUMER (1783-1865)]

NEW INFLUENCE. In 1843 there appeared, in Germany, the first two volumes of a very celebrated and influential History of Education, by a professor of mineralogy in the University of Erlangen, by the name of Karl Gcorg von Raumer. As a young man in Paris (1808-09), studying the great mineral collections found there, he read and was deeply stirred by Fichte's "Address to the German Nation" (p. 567). As a result he went to Yverdon, in 1809, and spent some months in studying the work in Pestalozzi's Institute. This interest in education he never lost, and thereafter, as professor of mineralogy at Halle and Erlangen, he also gave lectures on pedagogy (Uber Pädagogik). The outgrowth of these lectures was his four- volume History of Pedagogy from the Revival of Classical Studies to our own Time. [24] The work was done with characteristic German thoroughness, and for long served as a standard organization and text on the history of the development of educational theory and practice since the days of the Revival of Learning. The work of von Raumer stimulated many to a study of the writings of the earlier educational reformers, and numerous books and papers on educational history and theory soon began to appear. Most important, for American students, was Henry Barnard's monumental American Journal of Education, begun in 1855, and continued for thirty-one years. This is a great treasure-house of pedagogical literature for American educators.

After 1850 the organization of a technique of instruction for the elementary-school subjects took place rapidly, in the normal schools of all lands, as it had earlier in the German teachers' seminaries. By 1868 the study of the new Herbartian psychology and educational theory was well under way in Germany, and by 1890 in the United States. By 1875 the kindergarten, with its new theory of child life, was also beginning to make itself felt in both Europe and America. Between 1850 and 1875 Weber, Lotze, Fechner, and Wundt laid the foundations for a new psychology (R. 357), and in 1878 Wundt opened the first laboratory for the experimental study of psychology at the University of Leipzig. In 1890 William James published his two-volume work on Principles of Psychology, a book so original and lucid in treatment that it at once gave a new teaching organization to modern psychology. After about 1880, the extension of education upward and outward in the United States, and the rapid development of state school systems which had by that time begun, began to make new demands for better scientific and legal and administrative organization, and this gave rise to a new type of educational literature.

After von Raumer's work, probably the greatest single stimulative influence of the mid-nineteenth century was that exerted by the marked successes of the Prussian armies in a series of short but very decisive wars. Against Denmark (1864) and Austria (1866), but in particular in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the Prussian armies proved irresistible. These military operations attracted new attention to education, and "the Prussian schoolmaster has triumphed" became a common world saying. This, coupled with the remarkable national development of United Germany which almost immediately set in, caused progressive nations to turn to the study of education with increased interest. The English and Scottish universities now began to establish lectureships in the theory and history of education, [25] and the first university chairs in education in the United States were founded.

THE UNIVERSITY STUDY OF EDUCATION. In no country in the world have the universities, within the past three decades, given the attention to the study of Education—a term that in English-speaking lands has replaced the earlier and more limited "Pedagogy"—that has been given in the United States. [26] After the United States the newer universities of England probably come next. Up to 1890 less than a dozen chairs of education had been established in all the colleges of the United States, and their work was still largely limited to historical and philosophical studies of education, and to a type of classroom methodology and school management, since almost entirely passed over to the normal schools. By 1920 there were some four hundred colleges in the United States giving serious courses on educational history and procedure and administration, many of them maintaining large and important professional Schools of Education for the more scientific study of the subject, and for the training of leaders for the service of the nation's schools.