With such a concrete body of facts contrasting primitive with modern civilized social life the student will naturally inquire, How did these changes come about? At this point should come normally the answer in terms of what practically all sociologists agree upon; namely, the three great sets of determining forces or phenomena, the three "controls": (1) the physical environment (climate, topography, natural resources, etc.); (2) man's own nature (psycho-physical factors, the factors in biological evolution, the role of instinct, race, and possibly the concrete problems of immigration and eugenics); (3) social heredity (folk-ways, customs, institutions, the arts of life, the methods of getting a living, significance of tools, distribution of wealth, standards of living, etc.) A blackboard diagram will show how these various factors converge upon any given individual.[[37]]
The amplification of these three points will ordinarily make up the body of an introductory course so far as class work goes. Ethnography should furnish rich illustrative material. But to make class discussions really productive the student's knowledge of his own community must be drawn upon. And the best way of getting this correlation is through community surveys. The student should be required as parallel laboratory work to prepare a series of chapters on his ward or part of his ward or village, covering the three sets of determining factors. The instructor may furnish an outline of the topics to be investigated, or he may pass around copies of such brief survey outlines as Aronovici's Knowing One's Own Community or Miss Byington's What Social Workers Should Know about Their Own Communities; he may also refer them to any one of the rapidly growing number of good urban and rural surveys as models. But he should not give too much information as to where materials for student reports may be obtained. The disciplinary value of having to hunt out facts and uncover sources is second only to the value of accurate observation and effective presentation. If the aim of a sociology course is social efficiency, experience shows no better way of getting a vivid, sober, first-hand knowledge of community conditions. And there is likewise no surer way of compelling students to substitute facts for vapid wordiness and snap judgments.
Toward the end of the course many of us have found it profitable to introduce a brief discussion of what may be called the highest term of the series; namely, the evolution of two or three typical institutions, say law and government, education, religion, and the family. These topics will serve to clinch the earlier discussions and to crystallize a few ideas on social control and perhaps even social progress.
Normally such a course will close with a fuller definition of the meaning of sociology, its content, its value in the study of other sciences, and, if time permits, a brief historical sketch of the development of sociology as a separate science.
The use of a text for study
I have no certified advice to offer on the question of textbooks. But the almost universal cry of sociology teachers is that so far no really satisfactory text has been produced. Some men still use Spencer, some write their own books, some try to adapt to their particular needs such texts as are issued from time to time, some use none at all but depend upon a more or less well-correlated syllabus or set of readings. There is undoubtedly a profitable demand for a good elementary source book comparable to Thomas's Source Book on Social Origins or Marshall, Wright, and Field's Materials for the Study of Elementary Economics. Nearly any text will need freshening up by collateral reading from such periodicals as The Survey or The New Republic. In order to secure effective and correlated outside reading, many teachers have found it helpful to require the students to devote the first five or ten minutes of a class meeting once a week or even daily to a written summary of their readings and of class discussions. Such a device keeps readings fresh and enables the teacher to emphasize the points of contact between readings and class work.
The social museum
Every university should develop some sort of a social museum, to cover primitive types of men, the evolution of tools, arts of life, manners and customs, and contemporary social conditions. These can be displayed in the form of plaster casts, ethnographic specimens, photographs, lantern slides, models of housing, statistical charts, printed monographs, etc. The massing of a series of these illustrations sometimes produces a profound effect. For example, the corridor leading to the sociology rooms at the University of Minnesota has been lined with large photographs of tenement conditions, child labor, immigrant types, etc. The student's interest and curiosity have been heightened immensely. Once a semester, during the discussion of the economic factor in social life, we stage what is facetiously called "a display of society's dirty linen." The classroom is decorated with a set of charts showing the distribution of wealth, wages, cost of living, growth of labor unions and other organizations of economic protest. The mass effect is a cumulative challenge.
Field work: values and limitations
Finally, a word about "field work" as a teaching device. Field work usually means some sort of social service practice work under direction of a charitable agency, juvenile court, settlement, or playground. But beginning students are usually more of a liability than an asset to such agencies; they lack the time to supervise students' work, and field work without strict supervision is a farcical waste of time. If such agencies will accept a few students who have the learner's attitude rather than an inflated persuasion of their social Messiahship, field work can become a very valuable adjunct to class work. In default of such opportunities the very best field work is an open-eyed study of one's own community, in the attempt to find out what actually is rather than to reform a hypothetical evil.[[38]]