Schools of to-morrow

by John Dewey; Evelyn Dewey

While all schools realize the importance of healthy pupils, the possibilities of using the activities of the child that are employed in giving him a strong healthy body, for general educational purposes, are not so well understood. As yet it is the pioneer in education who realizes the extent to which young children learn through the use of their bodies, and the impossibility of insuring general intelligence through a system which does not use the body to teach the mind and the mind to teach the body. This is simply a restatement of Rousseau’s proposition that the education of the young child rests largely on whether he is allowed to “develop naturally” or not. It has already been pointed out to what an extent Mrs. Johnson depends on the physical growth of her pupils as a tool for developing their intellectual ability, as well as the important part that muscular skill plays in the educational system of Madame Montessori. This seems not only reasonable but necessary when we think of the mere amount of movement, handling, and feeling of things that a baby must indulge in to understand the most familiar objects in its environment, and remember that the child and the adult learn with the same mental machinery as the very small child. There is no difference in the way the organism works after it is able to talk and walk; the difference lies in the greater complexity of activities which is made possible by the preliminary exercises. Modern psychology has pointed out the fact that the native instincts of a human being are his tools for learning. Instincts all express themselves through the body; therefore education which stifles bodily activities, stifles instincts, and so prevents the natural method of learning. To the extent of making an educational application of this fact, all the schools described are using the physical activities of their pupils, and so the means of their physical development, as instruments for training powers of judgment and right thinking. That is to say the pupils are learning by doing. Aside from the psychological reasons for teaching by this method, it is the logical consequence of a realization of the importance of the physical welfare of the child, and necessarily brings changes in the material of the schoolroom.

What are the pupils to do in order to learn? Mere activity, if not directed toward some end, may result in developing muscular strength, but it can have very little effect on the mental development of the pupils. These schools have all answered the question in the same general way, though the definite problems on which they work differ. The children must have activities which have some educative content, that is, which reproduce the conditions of real life. This is true whether they are studying about things that happened hundreds of years ago or whether they are doing problems in arithmetic or learning to plane a board. The historical facts which are presented must be true, and whether the pupils are writing a play based on them or are building a viking boat, the details of the work as well as the main idea must conform to the known facts. When a pupil learns by doing he is reliving both mentally and physically some experience which has proved important to the human race; he goes through the same mental processes as those who originally did these things. Because he has done them he knows the value of the result, that is, the fact. A statement, even of facts, does not reveal the value of the fact, or the sense of its truth—of the fact that it is a fact. Where children are fed only on book knowledge, one “fact” is as good as another; they have no standards of judgment or belief. Take the child studying weights and measures; he reads in his text-book that eight quarts make a peck, but when he does examples he is apt, as every schoolteacher knows, to substitute four for eight. Evidently the statement as he read it in the book did not stand for anything that goes on outside the book, so it is a matter of accident what figure lodges in his brain, or whether any does. But the grocer’s boy who has measured out pecks with a quart measure knows. He has made pecks; he would laugh at anybody who suggested that four quarts made a peck. What is the difference in these two cases? The schoolboy has a result without the activity of which it is the result. To the grocer’s boy the statement has value and truth, for it is the obvious result of an experience—it is a fact.

Thus we see that it is a mistake to suppose that practical activities have only or even mainly a utilitarian value in the schoolroom. They are necessary if the pupil is to understand the facts which the teacher wishes him to learn; if his knowledge is to be real, not verbal; if his education is to furnish standards of judgment and comparison. With the adult it is undoubtedly true that most of the activities of practical life have become simply means of satisfying more or less imperative wants. He has performed them so often that their meaning as types of human knowledge has disappeared. But with the school child this is not true. Take a child in the school kitchen; he is not merely preparing that day’s midday meal because he must eat; he is learning a multitude of new things. In following the directions of the recipe he is learning accuracy, and the success or failure of the dish serves as an excellent measure of the pupil’s success. In measuring quantities he is learning arithmetic and tables of measures; in mixing materials, he is finding out how substances act when they are manipulated; in baking or boiling he is discovering some of the elementary facts of physics and chemistry. Repetition of these acts by adults, after the muscular and intellectual mastery of the adjustments they call for has been established, gives the casual thinker the impression that pupils also are doing no more than wasting their time on insignificant things. The grocer’s boy knows what a peck is because he has used it to measure things with, but since his stock of knowledge is not increased as he goes on measuring out peck after peck, the point is soon reached where intellectual discovery ends and mere performance of a task takes its place. This is the point where the school can see that the pupil’s intellectual growth continues; while the activity of the mere worker who is doing the thing for its immediate practical use becomes mechanical. The school says the pupil has had enough of this particular experience; he knows how to do this thing when he needs to and he has understood the principles or facts which it illustrates; it is time he moved on to other experiences which will teach him other values and facts. When the pupil has learned how to follow a recipe, how to handle foodstuffs and use the stove he does not go on repeating the same elementary steps; he begins to extend his work to take in the larger aspects of cooking. The educative value of the cooking lessons continues because he is now studying questions of food values, menus, the cost of food, and the chemistry of food stuffs, and cooking. The kitchen becomes a laboratory for the study of a fundamental factor in human life.

Training the hand, eye, and brain by doing useful work. (Gary, Ind.)

The moral advantages of an active form of education reënforce its intellectual benefits. We have seen how this method of teaching necessitates greater freedom for the pupil, and that this freedom is a positive factor in the intellectual and moral development of the pupils. In the same way the substitution of practical activities for the usual isolated text-book study achieves positive moral results which are marked to any teacher who has used both methods. Where the accumulation of facts presented in books is the standard, memory must be relied upon as the principal tool for acquiring knowledge. The pupil must be stimulated to remember facts; it makes comparatively little difference whether he has to remember them in the exact words of the book, or in his own words, for in either case the problem is to see that he does store up information. The inevitable result is that the child is rewarded when his memory is successful, and punished by failure and low marks when it is not successful. The emphasis shifts from the importance of the work that is done to the pupil’s degree of external success in doing it. Since no one’s performance is perfect, the failures become the obvious and emphasized thing. The pupil has to fight constantly against the discouragement of never reaching the standard he is told he is expected to reach. His mistakes are constantly corrected and pointed out. Such successes as he achieves are not especially inspiring because he does no more than reproduce the lesson as it already exists in the book. The virtues that the good scholar will cultivate are the colorless, negative virtues of obedience, docility, and submission. By putting himself in an attitude of complete passivity he is more nearly able to give back just what he heard from the teacher or read in the book.

Rewards and high marks are at best artificial aims to strive for; they accustom children to expect to get something besides the value of the product for work they do. The extent to which schools are compelled to rely upon these motives shows how dependent they are upon motives which are foreign to truly moral activity. But in the schools where the children are getting their knowledge by doing things, it is presented to them through all their senses and carried over into acts; it needs no feat of memory to retain what they find out; the muscles, sight, hearing, touch, and their own reasoning processes all combine to make the result part of the working equipment of the child. Success gives a glow of positive achievement; artificial inducements to work are no longer necessary, and the child learns to work from love of the work itself, not for a reward or because he is afraid of a punishment. Activity calls for the positive virtues—energy, initiative, and originality—qualities that are worth more to the world than even the most perfect faithfulness in carrying out orders. The pupil sees the value of his work and so sees his own progress, which spurs him on to further results. In consequence his mistakes do not assume undue importance or discourage him. He can actively use them as helps in doing better next time. Since the children are no longer working for rewards, the temptation to cheat is reduced to the minimum. There is no motive for doing dishonest acts, since the result shows whether the child has done the work, the only end recognized. The moral value of working for the sake of what is being done is certainly higher than that of working for rewards; and while it is possible that a really bad character will not be reformed by being placed in a situation where there is nothing to be gained excepting through an independent and energetic habit of work, the weak character will be strengthened and the strong one will not form any of those small bad habits that seem so unimportant at first and that are so serious in their cumulative effect.

Another point that most of the present day reformers have in common, in distinction from the traditional way of looking at school work, is the attempt to find work of interest to the pupils. This used to be looked at as a matter of very little importance; in fact a certain amount of work that did not interest was supposed to be a very good thing for the moral character of the pupil. This work was supposed to have even greater disciplinary qualities than the rest of the work. Forcing the child to carry through a task which did not appeal to him was supposed to develop perseverance and strength of character. There is no doubt that the ability to perform an irksome duty is a very useful accomplishment, but the usefulness does not lie in the irksomeness of the task. Things are not useful or necessary because they are unpleasant or tiresome, but in spite of these characteristics. The habit of giving work to pupils solely for the sake of its “disciplinary” value would seem to indicate a blindness to moral values rather than an excess of moral zeal, for after all the habit is little more than holding up a thing’s defects as its virtues.

But if lack of interest is not to be admitted as a motive in selection of class work, it is fair enough to object that interest can not serve as a criterion, either. If we take interest in its narrowest sense, as meaning something which amuses and appeals to the child because of its power of entertainment, the objection has truth. The critic of the new spirit in education is apt to assume that this narrow sense is what is meant when he hears that the pupils ought to be interested in what they are doing. Then logically enough he goes on to point out that such a system lacks moral fiber, that it caters to the whims of children, and is in reality an example of the general softening of the social fiber, of every one’s desire for the easy way. But the work is not made easy for the pupils; nor yet is there any attempt to give the traditional curriculum a sugar coating. The change is of a more fundamental character and is based on sound psychological theory. The work given to the children has changed; the attempt is not to make all the child’s tasks interesting to him, but to select work on the basis of the natural appeal it makes to the child. Interest ought to be the basis for selection because children are interested in the things they need to learn.

Every one is familiar with the way a baby will spend a long time making over and over again the same motions or feeling of some object, and of the intense interest children two and three years old take in building a tower of blocks, or filling a pail with sand. They do it not once but scores of times, and always with the same deep absorption, for it is real work to them. Their growing, unformed muscles have not yet learned to act automatically; every motion that is aimed at something must be repeated under the conscious direction of the child’s mind until he can make it without being aware of effort towards an adjustment. Since the little child must adjust the things about him, his interests and his needs are identical; if they were not he could not live. As a child grows older his control over his immediate needs so rapidly becomes automatic, that we are apt to forget that he still learns as the baby does. The necessary thing is still, as it will be all his life, the power of adjustment. Good adjustment means a successful human being, so that instinctively we are more interested in learning these adjustments than in anything else. Now the child is interested in adjusting himself through physical activity to the things he comes up against, because he must master his physical environment to live. The things that are of interest to him are the things that he needs to work on. It is then the part of wisdom in selecting the work for any group of children, to take it from that group of things in the child’s environment which is arousing their curiosity and interest at that time. Obviously as the child grows older and his control of his body and physical environment increases he will reach out to the more complicated and theoretical aspects of the life he sees about him.