If history be regarded as just the record of the past, it is hard to see any grounds for claiming that it should play any large rôle in the curriculum of elementary education. The past is the past, and the dead may be safely left to bury its dead.

There are too many urgent de

mands in the present, too many calls over the threshold of the future,

to permit the child to become
deeply immersed in what is
forever gone by. Not so
when history is considered
an account of the forces and
forms of social life. Social
life we have always with us;
the distinction of past and
present is indifferent to it.
Whether it was lived just
here or just there is a matter
of slight moment. It is life
for all that; it shows the
motives which draw men to-
gether and push them apart,
and depicts what is desirable
and what is hurtful. Whatever history may be for the scientific his-
torian, for the educator it must be an indirect sociology a study of
society which lays bare its process of becoming and its modes of organ-
ization. Existing society is both too complex and too close to the
child to be studied. He finds no clues into its labyrinth of detail, and
can mount no eminence whence to get a perspective of arrangement.

FIG. 90. CONSTRUCTIVE ACTIVITY IN THE
STUDY OF HISTORY

Dewey's Experimental School, Chicago

If the aim of historical instruction is to enable the child to appreciate the values of social life, to see in imagination the forces which favor and let men's effective coöperation with one another, to understand the sorts of character that help on and that hold back, the essential thing in its presentation is to make it moving, dynamic. History must be presented not as an accumulation of results or effects, a mere statement of what happened, but as a forceful, acting thing. The motives, that is, the motors, must stand out. To study history is not to amass information, but to use information in constructing a vivid picture of how and why men did thus and so; achieved their successes and came to their failures.

When history is conceived as dynamic, as moving, its economic and industrial aspects are emphasized. These are but technical terms which express the problem with which humanity is unceasingly engaged; how to live, how to master and use nature so as to make it tributary to the enrichment of human life. The great advances in civilization have come through those manifestations of intelligence which have lifted man from his precarious subjection to nature, and

revealed to him how he may make its forces coöperate with his own purposes. The social world in which the child now lives is so rich and full that it is not easy to see how much it cost, how much effort and thought lie back of it. Man has a tremendous equipment ready at hand. The child may be led to translate these ready-made resources into fluid terms; he may be led to see man face to face with nature, without inherited capital, without tools, without manufactured materials. And, step by step, he may follow the processes by which man recognized the needs of his situation, thought out the weapons and instruments that enabled him to cope with them; and may learn how these new resources opened new horizons of growth and created new problems. The industrial history of man is not a materialistic or a merely utilitarian affair. It is a matter of intelligence. Its record is the record of how man learned to think, to think to some effect, to transform the conditions of life so that life itself becomes a different thing. It is an ethical record as well; the account of the conditions which men have patiently wrought out to serve their ends.

The question of how human beings live, indeed, represents the dominant interest with which the child approaches historic material. It is this point of view which brings those who worked in the past close to the beings with whom he is daily associated, and confers upon him the gift of sympathetic penetration.

The child who is interested in the way in which men lived, the tools they had to do with, the new inventions they made, the transformations of life that arose from the power and leisure thus gained, is eager to repeat like processes in his own action, to remake utensils, to reproduce processes, to rehandle materials. Since he understands their problems and their successes only by seeing what obstacles and what resources they had from nature, the child is interested in field and forest, ocean and mountain, plant and animal. By building up a conception of the natural environment in which lived the people he is studying, he gets his hold upon their lives. This reproduction he cannot make excepting as he gains acquaintance with the natural forces and forms with which he is himself surrounded. The interest in history gives a more human coloring, a wider significance, to his own study His knowledge of nature lends point and accuracy to his study of history. This is the natural "correlation" of history and

science.

CHAPTER XXIX

NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS

THE Readings of this chapter have been selected with a view to illustrating a few of the more important new tendencies in educational organization - political, scientific, vocational, and sociological which have characterized educational progress in recent decades.

The first (367), dealing with the environmental influence of the State, sets forth the new state needs and the different attitudes toward education which the State may legitimately assume. The second (368) is introduced to show how governments, interested in the promotion of national welfare, may turn the school into new directions the better to serve national ends. The third (369) states well the position of the university as the head and crown. of the state's educational system, and the relation of university thinking and teaching to national welfare and progress.

The next three selections relate to applied science and vocational training in the schools. The first of the group (370) describes the work of the Folk High Schools in Denmark, a little nation that had been made over by agricultural education since its spoliation at the hands of Prussia, in 1864. The second (371) describes the extended work done by the Germans in developing vocational training, before the World War. The third (372) states well the intimate relation existing, under modern industrial conditions, between the vocational education of a people and national prosperity.

The three selections which close the chapter have been chosen to illustrate some of the new attitudes toward child care and child welfare which have characterized the late nineteenth century. From the first (373), one may obtain a good idea of the change in attitude toward child labor and child welfare. The second (374) states simply and clearly the new problem of child labor. The third (375) describes briefly the reasons for the school undertaking a better supervision of child health than parents are usually able to provide.

367. The Environmental Influence of the State

(McKechnie, W. S., The State and the Individual, pp. 363-64. Glasgow, 1896)

The duty of the State in the matter of training the young for citizenship in the State, and the positions toward such training which it may legitimately assume, are well stated in the following selection.

The child comes into the world a bundle of undeveloped potentialities, void of experience and thought. The environment and external circumstances necessary for the growth of his mind and body are all supplied by the State. This is true, although not all nor even the chief part of them are imparted to the child directly by the officials of the government or by the laws or other organs of the State. The immediate environment depends on the influence of the family and of other institutions and agencies included in and controlled by the State. The child may have "innate ideas" in the sense of that a priori element which is one of the prerequisites of all conscious existence; but the equally necessary a posteriori element can be got only from experience; and the sphere of the State, or of various parts of the State, is the only school where experience is possible for him. He is born into the commonwealth, and from the day of his birth the rights of citizenship, which he cannot actually enjoy till he has acquired full age, are held in trust for him by the State. It is true that it is the family whose influences at first surround him, molding his earliest tendencies and aspirations after its traditions, but the family itself would be empty of content except for what flows into it from society and the State. The community as a whole, then, is the environment of the individual. It is the State which fills him with its own ideas and molds him after its own pattern. The English youth grows up with habits and ideas quite absent in the Zulu or even in the Frenchman. Allowing all claims for heredity though this too has been indirectly supplied by the State through ancestors who were themselves its members his environment has made him what he is.

The State then using the word in its widest sense - puts its stamp on the young individuality before he has reached manhood and acquired the ability to choose his own surroundings. Willingly or unwillingly, it educates the individual and so has a terrible responsibility thrust upon its shoulders. The young mind as well as the young body is thrown upon its care during the important and impressionable years fated to mold the development of an immortal soul for time and for eternity. This trust, burdensome and disquieting as it is, is yet one which the State dare not decline.

Its duty to the young cannot be brushed aside or lightly treated. But it has also a duty to itself. In each helpless child lies a future

citizen who will form an organic portion of the commonwealth, and may exercise a deep and lasting influence on its destinies. All children cannot become great statesmen, but all great statesmen once were children.

On these two grounds the State has both a right and a duty to include the education of the young within its proper province. Indeed it must educate whether it will or no. The only question is whether it will do so consciously or unconsciously, systematically or at random, well or ill. Government need not undertake the work of education, but the supreme legislative sovereign is forced to assume some attitude towards that all-important question.

There are three positions, any one of which Parliament may adopt. (I) It may repudiate all direct responsibility, leaving each child to scramble for itself. (II) It may compel parents to educate their offspring at their own expense. (III) It may enforce education upon all, and pay for it out of the national purse. Each of these three courses has its adherents.

368. German Secondary Schools and National Needs (Address of Emperor William II, at Berlin Conference of 1890. Translated in Report United States Commissioner of Education, 1889-90, vol. 1, pp. 359-63)

In 1890, after some previous discussion, a call was issued for a conference on problems relating to the German secondary schools. At this conference the then young German Emperor, William II, gave the main opening address, demanding that the instruction be changed to serve better the national ends. His speech created widespread discussion among German secondary schoolmasters, and is important as revealing new national conceptions as to the place and purpose of the secondary school. He said, in part:

GENTLEMEN: I desire to address a few words to you at the outset because it seemed to me important that you should know from the first what I think about this matter. Naturally there will be many things discussed that cannot be decided, and I believe that many points will remain cloudy and obscure. I have considered it proper not to leave the gentlemen in doubt as to my own views.

In the first place I wish to observe that we have to do here above all not with a political school question, but entirely with technical and pedagogical measures which we must adopt in order to fit the growing generation for the demands of the present, for the position of our Fatherland and of our life in the world at large.

...

This cabinet order, which the honorable minister has had the goodness to mention before, would perhaps not have been necessary if the schools had stood in the position where they ought to have stood. I