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

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

In the great advances which have taken place in the organization of education, during these three decades, no institution in the world has exerted a more important influence than has "Teachers College," Columbia University, in the City of New York, which was organized in 1887 as "The New York College for the Training of Teachers," but since 1890 has been affiliated with Columbia University, under its present name. This institution has been a model copied by many others over the world; has trained a large percentage of the leaders in education in the United States; and has been particularly influential with students from England, the English self-governing dominions, China, and South America.

To-day, in all the state universities and in many non-state institutions in the United States, we find well-organized Teachers' Colleges engaged in a work which two decades ago was being attempted by but a few institutions anywhere, In the municipal universities of England, in Canada, in Japan and China, and in other democratic lands, we find the beginnings of a similar development of the scientific study of education. In these Schools or Colleges for the scientific study of education the best thinking on the problems of the reorganization and administration of education, and the most new and creative work, has been and is being done. [27]

THE PROBLEMS OF THE PRESENT. Pestalozzi dreamed that he might be able to psychologize instruction and reduce all to an orderly procedure, which, once learned, would make one a master teacher. What he was not able to accomplish he died thinking others after him would do. The problem of education has had, with time, no such simple and easy solution. Instead, with the development of state school systems, the extension of education in many new directions to meet new needs, and the application to the study of education of the same scientific methods which have produced such results in other fields of human knowledge, we have come to-day to have hundreds of problems, many of which are complex and difficult and which influence deeply the welfare of society and the State. That these problems, even with time, will receive any such simple solution as that of which Pestalozzi dreamed, may well be doubted. In the days of church control, memoriter instruction, and a school for religious ends, education was a simple matter; to-day it partakes of the difficulty and complexity which characterize most of the problems of modern world States. In consequence of this important change in the character of education a great number of important problems in educational organization, practice, and procedure now face us for solution.

Space can here be taken to mention only the more prominent of these present-day educational problems. On the administrative side is a whole group of problems relating to forms of organization: the proper educational relationships between the State and its subordinate units; the development of a state educational policy: the types of instruction the State must provide, and compel attendance upon; questions of taxation and support, compulsory attendance, and child labor; the training and oversight of teachers for the service of the State; problems of child health and welfare; the provision of adequate and professional supervision; the provision of continuation schools, and of industrial and vocational training; the supervision of school buildings for health and sanitary control; and the relation of the State to private and parochial education. The problem of how to produce as effective and as thorough education for leadership with a one-class school system as with a two- class; the opening-up of opportunity for youth of brains in any social class to rise and be trained for service; the selection and proper training of those of superior intelligence; the elimination of barriers to the advancement of children of large intellectual endowment; and what best to do with those of small intellectual capacity, form another important group of present-day educational problems. Vocational training and technical education, and the relation and the proper solution of these questions to national happiness and prosperity and human welfare, form still another important group. The many questions which hinge upon instruction; the elimination of useless subject-matter; the best organization of instruction; proper aims and ends; moral and civic training; the most economical organization of school work; the saving of time; and what are desirable educational reorganizations, all these form a group of instructional problems of large significance for the future of public education. Still more in detail, but of large importance, are the questions relating to the scientific measurement of the results of instruction; the erection of attainable goals in teaching; and the introduction of scientific accuracy into educational work. Still another important group of problems relates to the readjustment of inherited school organization and practices, the better to meet the changed and changing conditions of national life—social, industrial, political, religious, economic, scientific—brought about by the industrial and social and scientific and political revolutions which have taken place.

These represent some of the more important new problems in education which have come to challenge us since the school was taken over from the Church and transformed into the great constructive tool of the State. Their solution will call for careful investigation, experimentation, and much clear thinking, and before they are solved other new problems will arise. So probably it will ever be under a democratic form of government; only in autocratic or strongly monarchical forms of government, where the study of problems of educational organization and adjustment are not looked upon with favor, can a school system to-day remain for long fixed in type or uniform in character. Education to-day has become intricate and difficult, requiring careful professional training on the part of those who would exercise intelligent control, and so intimately connected with national strength and national welfare that it may be truthfully said to have become, in many respects, the most important constructive undertaking of a modern State.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Show that education must be extended and increased in efficiency in proportion as the suffrage is extended, and additional political functions given to the electorate. Illustrate.

2. Trace the changes in the character of the instruction given in the schools, paralleling such changes.

3. Explain the difference in use of the schools for nationality ends in Germany and France.

4. Of what is the recent development of evening, adult, and extension education an index?