Your Committee does not attempt to state the exact proportion in which the child, at his various degrees of advancement, may be able to dispense with the guiding influence of teacher and text-book in his investigations, but they protest strongly against the illusion under which certain zealous advocates of the early introduction of scientific method seem to labor. They ignore in their zeal the deduction that is to be made for the guiding hand of the teacher, who silently furnishes to the child the experience that he lacks, and quietly directs his special attention to this or to that phase, and prevents him from hasty or false generalization as well as from undue exaggeration of single facts or principles. Here the teacher adds the needed scientific outlook which the child lacks, but which the mature scientist possesses for himself.
It is contended by some that the scientific frame of mind is adapted only to science, but not to art, literature, and religion, which have something essential that science does not reach; not because of the incompleteness of the sciences themselves, but because of the attitude of the mind assumed in the observation of nature. In analytic investigation there is isolation of parts one from another, with a view to find the sources of the influences which produce the phenomena shown in the object. The mind brings everything to the test of this idea. Every phenomenon that exists comes from beyond itself, and analysis will be able to trace the source.
Now, this frame of mind, which insists on a foreign origin of all that goes to constitute an object, debars itself in advance from the province of religion, art, and literature as well as of philosophy. For self-determination, personal activity, is the first principle assumed by religion, and it is tacitly assumed by art and literature, Classic and Christian. The very definition of philosophy implies this, for it is the attempt to explain the world by the assumption of a first principle, and to show that all classes of objects imply that principle as ultimate presupposition. According to this view it is important not to attempt to hasten the use of a strictly scientific method on the part of the child. In his first years he is acquiring the results of civilization rather as an outfit of habits, usages, and traditions than as a scientific discovery. He cannot be expected to stand over against the culture of his time, and challenge one and all of its conventionalities to justify themselves before his reason. His reason is too weak. He is rather in the imitation stage of mind than in that of criticism. He will not reach the comparative or critical method until the era of higher education.
However this may be, it is clear that the educational value of science and its method is a very important question, and that on it depends the settlement of the question where specialization may begin. To commence the use of the real scientific method would imply a radical change also in methods from the beginning. This may be realized by considering the hold which even the kindergarten retains upon symbolism and upon art and literature. But in the opinion of a majority of your Committee natural science itself should be approached, in the earliest years of the elementary school, rather in the form of results with glimpses into the methods by which these results were reached. In the last two years (the seventh and eighth) there may be some strictness of scientific form and an exhibition of the method of discovery. The pupil, too, may to some extent put this method in practice himself. In the secondary school there should be some laboratory work. But the pupil cannot be expected to acquire for himself fully the scientific method of dealing with nature until the second part of higher education—its post-graduate work. Nevertheless this good should be kept in view from the first year of the elementary school, and there should be a gradual and continual approach to it.
In the study of general history appears another branch of the secondary course. History of the native land is assumed to be an elementary study. History of the world is certainly a step further away from the experience of the child. It is held by some teachers to be in accordance with proper method to begin with the foreign relations of one’s native land and to work outward to the world-history. The European relations involved in the discovery and colonization of America furnish the only explanation to a multitude of questions that the pupil has started in the elementary school. He should move outward from what he has already learned, by the study of a new concentric circle of grounds and reasons, according to this view. This, however, is not the usual course taken. On beginning secondary history the pupil is set back face to face with the period of tradition, just when historic traces first make their appearance. He is, by this arrangement, broken off from the part of history that he has become acquainted with, and made to grapple with that period which has no relation to his previous investigations. It is to be said, however, that general history lays stress on the religious thread of connection, though less now than formerly. The world history is a conception of the great Christian thinker, St. Augustine, who held that the world and its history is a sort of antiphonic hymn, in which God reads his counsels, and the earth and man read the responses. He induced Orosius, his pupil, to sketch a general history in the spirit of his view. It was natural that the Old Testament histories, and especially the chapters of Genesis, should furnish the most striking part of its contents. This general history was connected with religion, and brought closer to the experience of the individual than the history of his own people. To commence history with the Garden of Eden, the Fall of Man, and the Noachian Deluge was to begin with what was most familiar to all minds, and most instructive, because it concerned most nearly the conduct of life. Thus religion furnished the apperceptive material by which the early portions of history were recognized, classified, and made a part of experience.
Now that studies in archæology, especially those in the Nile and Euphrates valleys, are changing the chronologies and the records of early times and adding new records of the past, bringing to light national movements and collisions of peoples, together with data by which to determine the status of their industrial civilization, their religious ideas, and the form of their literature and art, the concentric arrangement of all this material around the history of the chosen people as a nucleus is no longer possible. The question has arisen, therefore, whether general history should not be rearranged for the secondary school, and made to connect with American history for apperceptive material rather than with Old Testament history. To this it has been replied with force that the idea of a world history, as St. Augustine conceived it, is the noblest educative ideal ever connected with the subject of history. Future versions of general history will not desert this standpoint, we are told, even if they take as their basis that of ethnology and anthropology, for these, too, will exhibit a plan in human history—an educative principle that leads nations toward freedom and science, because the Creator of nature has made it, in its fundamental constitution, an evolution or progressive development of individuality. Thus the idea of divine Providence is retained, though made more comprehensive by bringing the whole content of natural laws within his will as his method of work.
These considerations, we are reminded by the partisans of humanity studies, point back to the educative value of history as corrective of the one-sidedness of the method of science. Science seeks explanation in the mechanical conditions of, and impulses received from, the environment, while history keeps its gaze fixed on human purposes, and studies the genesis of national actions through the previous stages of feelings, convictions, and conscious ideas. In history the pupil has for his object self-activity, reaction against environment, instead of mechanism, or activity through another.
The history of English literature is another study of the secondary school. It is very properly placed beyond the elementary school, for as taught it consists largely of the biographies of men of letters. The pupils who have not yet learned any great work of literature should not be pestered with literary biography, for at that stage the greatness of the men of letters cannot be seen. Plutarch makes great biographies because he shows heroic struggles and great deeds. The heroism of artists and poets consists in sacrificing all for the sake of their creations. The majority of them come off sadly at the hands of the biographer, for the reason that the very sides of their lives are described which they had slighted and neglected for the sake of the Muses. The prophets of Israel did not live in city palaces, but in caves; they did not wear fine raiment, nor feed sumptuously, nor conform to the codes of polite society. They were no courtiers when they approached the king. They neglected all the other institutions—family, productive industry, and state—for the sake of one, the Church, and even that not the established ceremonial of the people, but a higher and more direct communing with Jehovah. So with artists and men of letters, it is more or less the case, that the institutional side of their lives is neglected, or unsymmetrical, or if this is not the case, it will be found prosaic and uneventful, throwing no light on their matchless productions.
For these reasons, should not the present use of literary biography as it exists in secondary schools, and is gradually making its way into elementary schools, be discouraged, and the time now given to it devoted to the study of literary works of art? It will be admitted that the exposure of the foibles of artists has an immoral tendency on youth: for example, one affects to be a poet, and justifies laxity and self-indulgence through the example of Byron. Those who support this view hold that we should not dignify the immoral and defective side of life by making it a branch of study in school.