As for originations, whereby one generation progresses beyond another in control of the physical environment and of preventable evils, we are learning that only a few in the topmost ranges can produce them in the realm of abstractions. Only a few in the top one per cent can contribute to actual progress. As Franklin K. Lane has said, "Progress means the discovery of the capable. They are our natural masters. They lead because they have the right. And everything done to keep them from rising is a blow to what we call our civilization." To develop each according to his ability: this is democracy at its ideal best.
The education of the best thinkers should be an education for initiative and originality. Effective originality depends, first of all, upon sound and exhaustive knowledge of what the course of preceding events has been. To take their unique places in civilized society, it would seem, therefore, that the intellectually gifted need especially to know what the evolution of culture has been. And since at eight or nine years of age they are not as yet ready for specialization, what they need to know is the evolution of culture as it has affected common things. At present, this is not taught to children or to adolescents, except in fragmentary and casual ways. Persons typically graduate from elementary school, high school, and college, and take postgraduate degrees without learning much, if anything, about the evolution of lighting, of refrigeration, of shipping, of clothing, of etiquette, of trains, of libraries, and of a thousand things which have been contributed to the common life by persons in past times and which distinguish the life of civilized man from the existence of the savage. These things are vaguely taken for granted even by the intelligent, educated person. No systematic knowledge of how they came into being enriches his understanding. Nor is he aware of the biographies of those who have made his comfort and his safety possible. No more does he understand how dangerous and destructive forces came to be in the world. Of these vast fields the college graduate is typically ignorant, as has frequently been proved.
The activities which make up the life of a civilized man may be variously organized and classified for purposes of study in the elementary school. A number of the progressive schools have undertaken projects in these fields. The pupils in such schools usually test at a median of about 118 IQ, and the work they have done, while it is helpful and suggestive, is not what is needed for pupils of the caliber with which we are here dealing.
Topical classifications which have suggested themselves as areas for study might be stated as follows: food; shelter; clothing; transportation; sanitation and health; trade; time-keeping; illumination; tools and implements; communication; law; government; education; warfare; punishment; labor; recreation. Every one of these areas of human culture affords the opportunity and necessity for studying the evolution of common things, satisfying the intellectual curiosity, and challenging the power of learning of the children here considered.
ENRICHMENT UNITS AT SPEYER SCHOOL
Between the ages of seven and thirteen years, the minds of these children are occupied primarily with exploration of the world in which they have recently arrived. They are full of questions of fact, not yet being distracted by the emotional and dynamic interests that come with adolescence and adulthood. This is the golden age of the intellect. Why? How? When? Who? Where? What? are constantly on their tongues, as any parent of a child in our classes will testify.
Now, in accordance with the philosophy and psychology which we have tried all too briefly to indicate, a series of "enrichment units" is being worked out at Speyer School day by day in our classrooms. These are being published in the form of teachers' handbooks, in a series designated "The Evolution of Common Things," the first numbers of which have been published. It will take five years to complete the series, at the end of which time we shall know from experience how much knowledge along the lines indicated can be organized and learned by children above 130 IQ in the years of the elementary school.
The handbooks, as they appear in published form, will represent the actual work of the pupils themselves, guided by the teacher. The teachers did not discover and assemble the materials of instruction, and "give them out." The children did this work. In the end, the teacher organized the total work into an orderly sequence, and verbalized it in final form for presentation. But no teacher would have the time or energy to carry on the work of the school and also collect and compile the materials contained in one of these units.
When an area of knowledge has been circumscribed by the children as one chosen for study by class discussion, the teacher participating in the thinking but not leading it, the pupils (there are twenty-five in each class) divide themselves into "committees." These various groups of three to five children each bring special knowledge to the class periods, and all share in the sum total of facts and ideas thus assembled. Libraries are thoroughly utilized in this process. Ninety-five per cent of the pupils who were admitted to our classes in February, 1936 (they were then between the ages of seven and nine), had and were using "library cards" from the New York Public Library. They are taken by their teachers to the nearest branch of the Public Library on days arranged for, and they "look up" their own materials, following the topics listed.
Librarians were at first skeptical as to the wisdom of admitting these very young children to the card indices and other facilities of the library. But librarians are an open-minded group, and they were persuaded to let the children try. No difficulty at all has been experienced. Stedman showed long ago that elementary school children of IQ above 140 can use a library and consult reference books as well as students in the normal school do.