What is the educational world thinking and doing? Examine the program of the National Education Association, to meet week after next at Salt Lake City. I group some of the topics from the general sessions: First, What is education?; Education for freedom; The personal element in our educational problems; Teaching, and testing the teaching of essentials; Measuring results. Second, What shall we do with the single-room school?; The rural school; Fundamental reorganizations demanded by the rural life problem; Rural betterments; The schoolhouse evening center. Third, moral values in pupil self-government, The high school period as a testing time, Public schools and public health.
Relate these groups of topics with this definition of education from the late Andrew S. Draper, of honored memory:
"Education that has life and enters into life; education that makes a living and makes life worth living; education that can use English to express itself; education that does not assume that a doctor must be an educated man and that a mechanic or a farmer cannot be; education that appeals to the masses, that makes better citizens and a greater state; education that supports the imperial position of the State and inspires education in all of the States—that is the education that concerns New York."
Mingle with educational men and women, search the educational periodicals and programs, scan the educational books, visit the normal colleges; and I think you will discover that something like this is happening in the educational world: The content of education is being adapted to meet the needs of all the classes and the masses. The method of education is being adapted to the individual. The result is that education is being universalized, socialized, democratized.
In this adaptation of educational material and method, all eyes are upon the individual child. We are studying this child, working for him. We are playing for the batter, tackling the man with the ball. We believe it is more important to develop the undiscovered resource than to run all boys and all girls through the same hopper. A phrase used in the School Arts Magazine for May, 1913, in describing a notable Boston exhibit of art illustration, breathes this spirit: "Instruction in illustration, should be creative and individual from the outset. Models are posed to help in expressing more truthfully the conception of the illustrator rather than as a discipline in abstract drawing."
The true teacher never gives up a boy or a girl. But mind you, we are saving the individual, making a man out of him, not that he may be a self-centered unsocial phenomenon, but that he may be a fellow among men, a useful social unit. We want strong individuality willing and able to live in society.
Perhaps the biggest word in current education is motivation. That word motivation covers a multitude of sins and a multitude of virtues. Motivation does not mean coddling. It does not mean allowing the child to do as he pleases. On the other hand, motivation does not mean forcing an unnatural process or situation upon a helpless child or a helpless public. It does not mean that we are to give something to the child. Motivation is not didactic in attitude.
The spring of action in all of us is impulse. There is no time here to go into the psychology of instinct, impulse, emotion, motive, action, and all that. Suffice it for example that through the play instinct and impulse the wise teacher leads the child to a respect for fair-play, order, law, justice. The child never knows where he got it, but he has what he needed, and he has it indelibly. This process assumes a God-given wisdom on the part of the teacher: to know how that little mind is working, what it needs, how it may be brought to feel the need, and then to lead, draw out, educate that mind—O, miracle of miracles!
A step further in the consideration of the educational process: Perhaps there have been committed more atrocities, more crimes in the name of education, in the high school than in any other period of school life. More fairly stated, the crimes have been in the upper six years of the usual twelve,—in that period which is called adolescence. Why do so many boys and girls drop out of the upper grades? Why do so many youths never complete high school? The vocational training people have one answer, and it consists in letting the boy work at something of which he feels the need. They motivate his work. The boy from the farm can't read Tennyson's "Princess;" set him at the Breeder's Gazette or the testing of seed-corn; you can teach him English as readily through one task as the other. Only that boy never would learn English from "The Princess,"—and I love Tennyson.
As an example of skillful motivation in teaching may I describe a case which is also an object-lesson to librarians in correlating people and books? It is a third-year high school class in argumentation. After some preliminary study, one day the teacher remarks rather inconsequentially, "Do you know I believe the 'Boston tea party' was an unjustifiable destruction of property, and that unprejudiced historians now admit it?" Now that won't "go" in Kansas any easier than it will in Massachusetts. Teacher is immediately challenged, and she replies, "Well, I'll debate it with you; and I'll be fair and square with you and tell you of some material on your side. But there is one man whose authority I would not want to dispute; you'll surely treat me fairly, won't you?" A young lady member of the class at once puts a motion to the class that it will not be considered fair to use the writings of Edmund Burke against teacher. Does that class depend upon bluffing its way through that debate with teacher? No, it keeps us busy at the library to get material out fast enough, even though we had been previously informed by the teacher that the material would be wanted. Even Dr. Johnson's "Taxation no tyranny" is read with eagerness. Teacher finally agrees to debate even against Burke. Is Burke a bore to that class? Why, the library has to buy additional copies. Of course, the end desired by the teacher all the time was Burke.