365. Difficulties in Transforming the School The transformation of a nation's schools from institutions for formal training in book knowledge to institutions which give real life experience and prepare for intelligent living in modern society has everywhere been difficult. The following description of the difficulties experienced recently in China gives a picture of conditions not particularly different from those in other lands. (a) Relating Education to Life There is at least one more educational problem of importance deserving special mention, namely, the problem of effectively relating education to the life of those who receive it. In the western countries the conflict so long waged between formal book training and the newer, more practical forms of education centering in the social and industrial needs of children, may be said to have been settled theoreti.cally, at least, in favor of the latter, but in China the conflict has only just begun. For not until recent years has there been felt the need of bringing about a closer adjustment of school work to the changing social and industrial demands of the time, and of making the curriculum a means of preparing the pupils to solve the problems of their daily life. True enough, most of the modern school subjects, such as geography, civics, and the like, have been introduced into the regular course of study, but these subjects are often taught without much reference to the daily life of the pupil or that of the community. As a result, a serious doubt has arisen in the minds of many of the Chinese as to the efficacy of modern education in solving the perplexing problems of the country. There is a feeling on the part of some that both the subjects taught in school and the method used in teaching those subjects do little good to the children. Indeed, a loud cry has already been raised against this form of education as failing to do what is expected of it. The charge is made that from the moment a child enters school, he begins to alienate himself from the life of the family and that of the community, and that by the time he graduates he is fit neither to be a farmer nor to be a merchant. This serious charge against new education, although it is not true of all schools, is yet not made without grounds. The root of the trouble lies, as already suggested, in the fact that much of the school work consists of merely imparting knowledge without reference either to the purposes which brought the children to school, or to the needs of the community in which they live. To remedy the evil something fundamental needs to be done, both in the selection of material for the curriculum and in the method of teaching the various subjects of study. Fortunate it is for the new republic that these two problems are beginning to receive the serious attention of her more progressive leaders in education. (b) The Old Teacher and the New System The facts that China went into this work of educating a quarter of the population of the globe without a sufficient body of teachers and that the growth of the new educational system has been probably more rapid than was anticipated, would not have made the problem of supplying teachers so serious had China been able to recruit teachers from the old schools. This she has not been able to do, although many of the old teaching staff did find their way into modern schools. Chinese scholars there were, and many of them too, but they lacked the knowledge and the skill demanded of the teachers of modern schools. Under the old educational system any one could set up as a school teacher, and a great many scholars who had attained the first degree in the examination, to say nothing of the host of others who had failed, made this their chief means of obtaining a living. No certificate was required for teaching, and no book or curriculum was compulsory, except that which was universally established by tradition or usage. The instruction was usually imparted either in the home of the children or in that of the teacher. Such private schools seldom comprised more than twenty children. The kind of teaching tended to develop memory rather than reasoning power. Under the new system of education, the situation which the teacher has to face is entirely different. He must know more than mere Chinese classics and composition. He has to teach students in classes instead of individually. Again, the teacher in a modern school is expected to develop in the pupils the power of reasoning, instead of only mere memory. And the old-time teacher does not easily lend himself to the new order. He is by training conservative, inclined to cling to the methods to which he is accustomed. He is himself so wedded to the old that he confesses to a sort of intellectual awkwardness when he tries to use the new learning and new methods. In his fear of making mistakes, he confines himself closely to textbooks. Consciously or unconsciously he still over-emphasizes the value of memory. He himself is not trained to think, and of course is not inclined to adopt methods which quicken thought in his student. Modern pedagogy is to him so new a science that either he has little appreciation of its worth, or, if he is able to appreciate, he is not able to use it with facility and efficiency. 366. Socialization of School Work illustrated by History (Dewey, John, "The Aim of History in Elementary Education"; in To illustrate how Professor Dewey attempted to socialize the elementary school subjects, the following extract from his introduction to the monograph on History Teaching is given. 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 demands 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 together and push them apart, and depicts what is desirable. FIG. 90. CONSTRUCTIVE ACTIVITY IN THE Dewey's Experimental School, Chicago and what is hurtful. Whatever history may be for the scientific historian, for the educator it must be an indirect sociology a study of society which lays bare its process of becoming and its modes of organization. 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. 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 of nature. 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. |