Schools of to-morrow

by John Dewey; Evelyn Dewey

The other side of Pestalozzi is found in his more official school teaching career. Here also he attacked the purely verbal teaching of current elementary education and struggled to substitute a natural development. But instead of relying upon contact with objects used in active social pursuits (like those of the home), he fell back upon bare contact with the objects themselves. The result was a shift in Pestalozzi’s fundamental idea. Presentation of objects by the teacher seemed to take the place of growth by means of personal activities. He was dimly conscious of the inconsistency, and tried to overcome it by saying that there are certain fixed laws of development which can be abstracted from the various experiences of particular human beings. Education cannot follow the development going on in individual children at a particular time; that would lead to confusion and chaos, anarchy and caprice. It must follow general laws derived from the individual cases.

At this point, the emphasis is taken from participation in social uses of things and goes over to dependence upon objects. In searching for general laws which can be abstracted from particular experiences, he found three constant things: geometrical form, number, and language—the latter referring, of course, not to isolated verbal expressions but to the statement of the qualities of things. In this phase of his activity as teacher, Pestalozzi was particularly zealous in building up schemes of object-lesson teaching in which children should learn the spatial and numerical relations of things and acquire a vocabulary for expressing all their qualities. The notion that object-lessons, by means of presentation of things to the senses, is the staple of elementary education thus came from Pestalozzi. Since it was concerned with external things and their presentation to the senses, this scheme of education lent itself to definite formulation of methods which could be passed on, almost mechanically, from one person to another.

In developing such methods, Pestalozzi hit upon the idea that the “order of nature” consists in going from the simple to the complex. It became his endeavor to find out in every subject the A B C (as he called it) of observation in that topic—the simplest elements that can be put before the senses. When these were mastered, the pupils were to pass on to various complications of these elements. Thus, in learning to read, children were to begin with combinations like A B, E B, I B, O B; then take up the reverse combinations B A, B E, B I, B O, etc., until having mastered all the elements, they could go on to complex syllables and finally to words and sentences. Number, music, drawing were all taught by starting with simple elements which could be put before the senses, and then proceeding to build up more complex forms in a graded order.

So great was the vogue of this procedure that the very word “method” was understood by many to signify this sort of analysis and combination of external impressions. To this day, it constitutes, with many people, a large part of what is understood by “pedagogy.” Pestalozzi himself called it the psychologizing of teaching, and, more accurately, its mechanizing. He gives a good statement of his idea in the following words: “In the world of nature, imperfection in the bud means imperfect maturity. What is imperfect in its germ is crippled in its growth. In the development of its component parts, this is as true of the growth of the intellect as of an apple. We must, therefore, take care, in order to avoid confusion and superficiality in education, to make first impressions of objects as correct and as complete as possible. We must begin with the infant in the cradle, and take the training of the race out of the hands of blind sportive nature, and bring it under the power which the experience of the centuries has taught us to abstract from nature’s own processes.”

These sentences might be given a meaning to which no one could object. All of the educational reformers have rightly insisted upon the importance of the first years in which fundamental attitudes controlling later growth are fixed. There can be no doubt that if we could regulate the earlier relations of children to the world about them so that all ideas gained are certain, solid, definite, and right as far as they go, we might give children unconscious, intellectual standards which would operate later on with an efficacy quite foreign to our present experience. But the certainty and definiteness of geometrical forms, and of isolated qualities of objects are artificial. Correctness and completeness are gained at the expense of isolation from the every-day human experience of the child. It is possible for a child to learn the various properties of squares, rectangles, etc., and to acquire their names. But unless the squares and rectangles enter into his purposeful activities he is merely accumulating scholastic information. Undoubtedly it is better that the child should learn the names in association with the objects than to learn mere strings of words. But one is almost as far from real development as the other. Both are very far from the “firm, sensitive, and sure knowledge” which comes from using things for ends which appeal to the child. The things that the child uses in his household occupations, in gardening, in caring for animals, in his plays and games, have real simplicity and completeness of meaning for him. The simplicity of straight lines, angles, and quantities put before him just to be learned is mechanical and abstract.

For a long time the practical influence of Pestalozzi was confined to expelling from the schools reliance upon memorizing words that had no connection with things; to bringing object-lessons into the schools, and to breaking up every topic into its elements, or A B C, and then going on by graded steps. The failure of these methods to supply motives and to give real power made many teachers realize that things which the child has a use for are really simpler and more complete to him, even if he doesn’t understand everything about them, than isolated elements. In the newer type of schools, there is a marked return (though of course quite independently of any reference to Pestalozzi) to his earlier and more vital idea of learning by taking a share in occupations and pursuits which are like those of daily life and which are engaged in by the friends about him.

Different schools have worked the matter out in different ways. In the Montessori schools there is still a good deal of effort to control the growth of mind by the material presented. In others, as in the Fairhope experiment, the material is incidental and informal, and the curriculum follows the direct needs of the pupils.

Most schools fall, of course, between these two currents. The child must develop, and naturally, but society has become so complicated, its demands upon the child are so important and continuous, that a great deal must be presented to him. Nature is a very extensive as well as compact thing in modern life, including not only the intricate material environment of the child, but social relations as well. If the child is to master these he must cover a great deal of ground. How is this to be done in the best way? Methods and materials must be used which are in themselves vital enough to represent to the child the whole of this compact nature which constitutes his world. The child and the curriculum are two operative forces, both of them developing and reacting on each other. In visiting schools the things that are interesting and helpful to the average school teacher are the methods, and the curriculum, the way the pupils spend their time; that is, the way the adjustment between the child and his environment is brought about.

“Learning by doing” is a slogan that might almost be offered as a general description of the way in which many teachers are trying to effect this adjustment. The hardest lesson a child has to learn is a practical one, and if he fails to learn it no amount of book knowledge will make up for it: it is this very problem of adjustment with his neighbors and his job. A practical method naturally suggests itself as the easiest and best way of solving this problem. On the face of it, the various studies—arithmetic, geography, language, botany, etc.—are in themselves experiences. They are the accumulation of the past of humanity, the result of its efforts and successes, for generation after generation. The ordinary school studies present this not as a mere accumulation, not as a miscellaneous heap of separate bits of experience, but in some organized way. Hence, the daily experiences of the child, his life from day to day, and the subject matter of the schoolroom, are parts of the same thing; they are the first and last steps in the life of a people. To oppose one to the other is to oppose the infancy and maturity of the same growing life; it is to set the moving tendency and the final result of the same power over against each other; it is to hold that the nature and the destiny of the child war with each other.