A brief course in the teaching process

by George D. Strayer

But it is not in the industrial arts alone that school work may deal with genuine situations. A good teacher finds a hundred situations in which children can write for an audience. The writer recently attended the closing exercises of an elementary school where the graduating class had composed a play which they presented. The main plot of the story centered in a prize essay contest, and, as might be inferred, the essays which were read were those which the children had written during the regular class work. In geography the members of a sixth-grade class prepared talks to accompany pictures thrown on the screen from a lantern. In history certain incidents of the period which a class was studying were dramatized and presented to the whole school.

The president of a water company in a middle-western city told the writer that they kept things in better shape at the water works since they had agreed to allow the children to come to visit the waterworks whenever a teacher chose to bring a class. In the same city there is an unusual number of pianos in the schools, school playgrounds are being established, parents’ associations are active in coöperation with the teachers to improve school conditions. If one were asked to explain why the schools in this city are better, why they are so loyally supported and so proudly spoken of by all classes of people, the answer would be found, I believe, in the fact that there is a closer relationship between the school and activities outside the school in home and city than in most other places. If teachers more commonly had in mind the needs of the children during the time they are not in the school, it would be easier to find situations in which the school activities would be significant because of the genuine needs which are felt by the children.

If there were nothing gained toward socializing children through activities involving the coöperation of the whole group, the fact would remain that the best type of intellectual activity can be secured only with this most genuine of all incentives. Most people, even as adults, think better when they have some one with whom to discuss the problem in hand. It is true, too, that often the best teacher is one whose experience is somewhat similar to our own and whose attitudes and difficulties are similar to ours. Children can often interpret where teachers fail. It cannot be too often reiterated that it is the chief business of every teacher to render her services unnecessary. If the children taught are not at the end of any term’s work better able to work for themselves, more ready to take the initiative, more capable in defining their problems, in gathering data, and in finding solutions than they were at the beginning of the period, then the work has been a failure. Creative work[19] is not done when some one stands over the child and dictates his every step, nor does thinking consist in answering the questions which a teacher may put concerning the facts recorded in a text. There is entirely too much truth in the charge which is sometimes brought against our schools, that they fail to keep alive the intellectual activity which is natural to childhood.

We must never lose sight of the fact that a child who is vigorous intellectually, actively sympathetic with those causes which make for the general welfare, and able and willing to work in coöperation with others, even though this may mean that he subordinate himself to others for the time being, is the type of individual upon which our democracy depends for its perpetuation and for its future progress. It is necessary to emphasize the social side of school life because we have, in our anxiety to impart information and form habits, neglected this aspect of school life. The pity of it all is that in neglecting the child’s social development we have done less efficient work in the fields we sought to emphasize because of the lack of genuine motive. Whether we are concerned with habits, with the acquisition of knowledge, with development in clear thinking, or in fixing ideals, the maximum of return will be secured in the genuinely social situation. Children working together on real problems are being socialized through participation in social activities. There is no other way in which the school can contribute so certainly to the accomplishment of the aim of all education.

For Collateral Reading

John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education, and The School and Society.

Exercises.

1. What are the advantages to be derived from teaching a group rather than an individual?

2. What is the ideal relationship between teacher and pupils?