Each epoch must have its institutions. With the work of the past as a background, the present must constantly reshape the institutions which the past has bequeathed to it. These modified institutions, handed on in turn by the present, must again be rebuilt to meet the needs of the future; and so on through each succeeding age.
III Keeping Up with the Times
At times the march of progress is so rapid that even the most advanced grow breathless with attempts to keep abreast of the vanguard. Again, marking time for ages, progressive movements seem wholly dead, and the path to the future is overgrown with tradition, and blocked by oblivion and decay. The rapid advances of the nineteenth century, challenging the quickest to keep pace, forced upon many institutions surroundings wholly foreign to their bent and scope.
Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the educational system, which had its rise in an age of individualized industry and governmental non-interference, and now faces a newly inaugurated socialization of industry and an impromptu system of government control.
The new basis of education lies in the changes which the nineteenth century wrought in industry, transforming village life into city dwelling, and substituting for the skilled mechanic, using a tool, the machine, employing the unskilled worker. The men of the eighteenth century made political institutions, and were content with democracy; the men of the nineteenth century, accepting government as it stood, built up a new industry. The society which we in the twentieth century must erect upon the political and industrial triumphs of our forefathers, can never be successful unless it recognizes the fundamental character of the issues which nineteenth century industry and eighteenth century politics have brought into twentieth century life.
Is it too much to ask that the school stand foremost in this recognition of change, when it is in the school that the ideas of the new generation are moulded, tempered, and burnished? May we not expect that in its lessons to the young our educational system shall speak the language of the twentieth century rather than that of the eighteenth?
IV Education in the Early Home
Before the modern system of industry had its inception, while the old hand trades still held sway, at a time when the household was the center of work and pleasure, when the family made its butter, cheese, oatmeal, ale, clothing, tools, and utensils,—in such an atmosphere of domestic industry, Froebel wrote his famous “Education of Man.” Note this description of the way in which a father may educate his son. “The son accompanies his father everywhere, to the field and to the garden, to the shop and to the counting house, to the forest and to the meadow; in the care of domestic animals and in the making of small articles of household furniture; in the splitting, sawing, and piling up of wood; in all the work his father’s trade or calling involves.”[17] In another passage he calls upon parents, “more particularly fathers (for to their special care and guidance the child ripening into boyhood is confided),” to contemplate “their parental duties in child guidance;"[18] and he prefaces this exhortation with a long list of illustrations, suggesting the methods which may be pursued by the farm laborer, the goose-herd, the gardener, the forester, the blacksmith, and other tradesmen and craftsmen, in the education of their sons. Any such man, Froebel points out, may take his child at the age of two or three and teach him some of the simple rules of his trade. How different is the position of the son of a workman in a modern American city! An American city dweller reading Froebel’s discussion would not conceive of it as applying in any sense to him, or to his life.
V City Life and the New Basis for Education
The very thought of city life precludes the possibility of home work. The narrow house, the tenement, the great shop or factory, on the one hand, prevent the mechanic from carrying on his trade near his family; and on the other hand, make it impossible for the father whose work lies far from his home to give his boys the “special care and guidance” about which Froebel writes.