APPENDIX
THE TRAINING FOR THE NEW DEMOCRACY
THE training for the new democracy must be from the cradle—through nursery, school and play, and on and on through every activity of our life. Citizenship is not to be learned in good government classes or current events courses or lessons in civics. It is to be acquired only through those modes of living and acting which shall teach us how to grow the social consciousness. This should be the object of all day school education, of all night school education, of all our supervised recreation, of all our family life, of our club life, of our civic life.
When we change our ideas of the relation of the individual to society, our whole system of education changes. What we want to teach is interdependence, that efficiency waits on discipline, that discipline is obedience to the whole of which I am a part. Discipline has been a word long connected with school life—when we know how to teach social discipline, then we shall know how to “teach school.”
The object of education is to fit children into the life of the community.[[146]] Every coöperative method conceivable, therefore, must be used in our schools for this end. It is at school that children should begin to learn group initiative, group responsibility—in other words social functioning. The group process must be learnt by practice. We should therefore teach subjects which require a working together, we should have group recitations, group investigations, and a gradual plan of self-government. Every child must be shown his place in the life that builds and his relation to all others who are building. All the little daily and hourly experiences of his interrelations must be constantly interpreted to him. Individual competition must, of course, disappear. All must see that the test of success is ability to work with others, not to surpass others.
Group work is, indeed, being introduced into our more progressive schools. Manual training, especially when the object made is large enough to require the work of two or more, cooking classes, school papers, printing classes etc., give opportunity for organization into groups with the essential advantage of the group: coördinated effort.
Moreover, we should have, and are beginning to have, group recitations. A recitation should not be to test the pupil but to create something. Every pupil should be made to feel that his point of view is slightly different from any one’s else, and that, therefore, he has something to contribute. He is not to “recite” something which the teacher knows already; he is to contribute not only to the ideas of his fellow-pupils but also to those of his teacher. And this is not impossible even for the youngest. Once when I was in Paris I made the acquaintance of little Michael, a charming English boy of five, who upon being taken to the Louvre by his mother and asked what he thought of the Mona Lisa, replied, with a most pathetic expression, “I don’t think she looks as if she liked little boys.” That was certainly a contribution to Mona Lisa criticism.
But after the child has been taught in his group recitation to contribute his own point of view, he must immediately be shown that he cannot over-insist upon it; he must be taught that it is only a part of the truth, that he should be eager for all the other points of view, that all together they can find a point of view which no one could work out alone. In other words we can teach collective thinking through group recitations.
A group recitation may give each pupil the feeling that a whole is being created: (1) by different points of view being brought out and discussed, and (2) by every one contributing something different: one will do some extra reading, one will bring clippings from newspapers and periodicals, one will take his camera to the Art Museum and take pictures of the casts. Thus we get life, and the lesson of life, into that hour. Thus may we learn the obligation and the joy of “belonging,” not only when our school goes to play some other school, but in every recitation hour of the day. The old idea was that no one should help another in a recitation; the new idea is that every one is to help every one else. The kind of competition you have in a group recitation is whether you have added as much as any one else. You now feel responsible not only for your contribution but that the recitation as a whole should be a worthy thing. Such an aim will overcome much of the present class-room indifference.
Many more of the regular school activities could be arranged on a group basis than is now thought possible—investigation for instance. This is a big word, but the youngest children sent out to the woods in spring are being taught “original research.”