LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| FACING PAGE | |
| A Test with Books Open. (Fairhope, Ala.) | [Frontispiece] |
| (1) Nature would Have Children Be Children before They Are Men. | [8] |
| (2) Teach the Child What Is of Use to Him as a Child. (Teachers’ College, N. Y. City) | [8] |
| To Learn to Think, We must Exercise Our Limbs. (Francis Parker School, Chicago) | [15] |
| (1) An Hour a Day Spent in the “Gym.” | [30] |
| (2) The Gully Is a Favorite Textbook. (Fairhope, Ala.) | [30] |
| Games often Require Muscular Skill, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. (University School, Columbia, Mo.) | [45] |
| (1) The Basis of the Year’s Work. (Indianapolis) | [58] |
| (2) Printing Teaches English. (Francis Parker School, Chicago) | [58] |
| Songs and Games Help Arithmetic. (Public School 45, Indianapolis) | [75] |
| The Pupils Build the School-Houses. (Interlaken School, Ind.) | [87] |
| Real Gardens for City Nature Study. (Public School 45, Indianapolis) | [97] |
| (1) Making a Town, instead of Doing Gymnastic Exercises. (Teachers’ College Playground, N. Y. City) | [109] |
| (2) Gymnasium Dances in Sewing-Class Costumes. (Howland School, Chicago) | [109] |
| Constructing in Miniature the Things They See around Them. (Play School, New York City) | [118] |
| Using the Child’s Dramatic Instinct to Teach History. (Cottage School, Riverside, Ill.) | [129] |
| Learning to Live through Situations That Are Typical of Social Life. (Teachers’ College, N. Y. City) | [140] |
| Solving Problems in School as They would Have to be Met out of School. (Francis Parker School, Chicago) | [159] |
| The Pupil Stays in the Same Building from Day Nursery Through High School. (Gary, Ind.) | [177] |
| Special Teachers for Special Subjects from the Very Beginning. (Gary, Ind.) | [193] |
| (1) The Boys Like Cooking More than the Girls Do. | [218] |
| (2) Mending Their Own Shoes, to Learn Cobbling. (Public School 26, Indianapolis) | [218] |
| Learning Moulding, and Manufacturing School Equipment. (Gary, Ind.) | [255] |
| Real Work in a Real Shop Begins in the Fifth Grade. (Gary, Ind.) | [269] |
| (1) Children Are Interested in the Things They Need to Know About. (Gary, Ind.) | [284] |
| (2) Making Their Own Clothes in Sewing Class. (Gary, Ind.) | [284] |
| Training the Hand, Eye, and Brain by Doing Useful Work. (Gary, Ind.) | [297] |
SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION AS NATURAL DEVELOPMENT
“We know nothing of childhood, and with our mistaken notions of it the further we go in education the more we go astray. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know without asking what a child is capable of learning.” These sentences are typical of the “Émile” of Rousseau. He insists that existing education is bad because parents and teachers are always thinking of the accomplishments of adults, and that all reform depends upon centering attention upon the powers and weaknesses of children. Rousseau said, as well as did, many foolish things. But his insistence that education be based upon the native capacities of those to be taught and upon the need of studying children in order to discover what these native powers are, sounded the key-note of all modern efforts for educational progress. It meant that education is not something to be forced upon children and youth from without, but is the growth of capacities with which human beings are endowed at birth. From this conception flow the various considerations which educational reformers since his day have most emphasized.
It calls attention, in the first place, to a fact which professional educators are always forgetting: What is learned in school is at the best only a small part of education, a relatively superficial part; and yet what is learned in school makes artificial distinctions in society and marks persons off from one another. Consequently we exaggerate school learning compared with what is gained in the ordinary course of living. We are, however, to correct this exaggeration, not by despising school learning, but by looking into that extensive and more efficient training given by the ordinary course of events for light upon the best ways of teaching within school walls. The first years of learning proceed rapidly and securely before children go to school, because that learning is so closely related with the motives that are furnished by their own powers and the needs that are dictated by their own conditions. Rousseau was almost the first to see that learning is a matter of necessity; it is a part of the process of self-preservation and of growth. If we want, then, to find out how education takes place most successfully, let us go to the experiences of children where learning is a necessity, and not to the practices of the schools where it is largely an adornment, a superfluity and even an unwelcome imposition.
But schools are always proceeding in a direction opposed to this principle. They take the accumulated learning of adults, material that is quite unrelated to the exigencies of growth, and try to force it upon children, instead of finding out what these children need as they go along. “A man must indeed know many things which seem useless to a child. Must the child learn, can he learn, all that the man must know? Try to teach a child what is of use to him as a child, and you will find that it takes all his time. Why urge him to the studies of an age he may never reach, to the neglect of those studies which meet his present needs? But, you ask, will it not be too late to learn what he ought to know when the time comes to use it? I cannot tell. But this I know; it is impossible to teach it sooner, for our real teachers are experience and emotion, and adult man will never learn what befits him except under his own conditions. A child knows he must become a man; all the ideas he may have as to man’s estate are so many opportunities for his instruction, but he should remain in complete ignorance of those ideas that are beyond his grasp. My whole book is one continued argument in support of this fundamental principle of education.”
Probably the greatest and commonest mistake that we all make is to forget that learning is a necessary incident of dealing with real situations. We even go so far as to assume that the mind is naturally averse to learning—which is like assuming that the digestive organs are averse to food and have either to be coaxed or bullied into having anything to do with it. Existing methods of instruction give plenty of evidence in support of a belief that minds are opposed to learning—to their own exercise. We fail to see that such aversion is in reality a condemnation of our methods; a sign that we are presenting material for which the mind in its existing state of growth has no need, or else presenting it in such ways as to cover up the real need. Let us go further. We say only an adult can really learn the things needed by the adult. Surely the adult is much more likely to learn the things befitting him when his hunger for learning has been kept alive continuously than after a premature diet of adult nutriment has deadened desire to know. We are of little faith and slow to believe. We are continually uneasy about the things we adults know, and are afraid the child will never learn them unless they are drilled into him by instruction before he has any intellectual or practical use for them. If we could really believe that attending to the needs of present growth would keep the child and teacher alike busy, and would also provide the best possible guarantee of the learning needed in the future, transformation of educational ideals might soon be accomplished, and other desirable changes would largely take care of themselves.