Measurement of the quantitative significance of factors in method.
Studies are also being made in several universities to determine the relative importance of the numerous factors in methods of teaching. This is done by conducting experiments with hundreds or thousands of children to find out by the most accurate measurement yet devised the amount of progress in learning that is wholly due to the presence of some one factor of method in the technique of class-room exercises. Educational psychology has revealed the qualitative significance of many of the single elements in the very complex procedure that we have called a ‘method of teaching,’ and this new type of research aims to determine the quantitative significance of each of these several elements of method as factors in the production of abilities. A. Duncan Yocum of the University of Pennsylvania has formulated a considerable number of tests, and, by preliminary experimentation, has determined the conditions under which they may with a high degree of accuracy be given to groups of students engaged in actual school work under ordinary class-room conditions. His students have made a number of tentative, but suggestive studies, which have not yet been published. Milo B. Hillegas of Columbia University and others are engaged on certain aspects of this general type of research. There is reason, therefore, to believe that we may sometime be able to measure with as much accuracy the efficiency of well-defined educational processes as we are now able to measure educational products. If this can be attained, the technique of class-room teachingand of educational supervision will begin to rest on a really scientific basis.
Fig. 56.—Indian house constructed in Dewey’s experimental school by children between seven and eight years of age, while studying the development of primitive life.(Reproduced from theElementary School Recordby permission of the University of Chicago Press.)
Fig. 56.—Indian house constructed in Dewey’s experimental school by children between seven and eight years of age, while studying the development of primitive life.
(Reproduced from theElementary School Recordby permission of the University of Chicago Press.)
Fig. 57.—Specimen No. 13 taken from the ‘Thorndike Writing Scale.’ This specimen constitutes the approximate quality of handwriting that may reasonably be expected of pupils in the seventh or eighth grade. In the complete scale the specimens are numbered from 4 to 18.
Fig. 57.—Specimen No. 13 taken from the ‘Thorndike Writing Scale.’ This specimen constitutes the approximate quality of handwriting that may reasonably be expected of pupils in the seventh or eighth grade. In the complete scale the specimens are numbered from 4 to 18.
Moreover, by the use of the improved statistical method and of scales, studies of greatly increased valueOther mental and social measurements,have been made of fatigue, retardation, elimination, and of other social and mental phenomena of individual children. And in 1911, with the reports of Paul H. Hanus of Harvard University and Ernest C. Moore of Yale University upon the school systems of Montclair and East Orange, New Jersey, there began to be institutedand ‘educational surveys.’those measurements and consequent criticisms of whole school systems, known as ‘educational surveys.’ These scientific reports have been extended to the educational work of a large number of cities and states throughout the Union. They are intended to enable school officers and patrons to comprehend with more definiteness the absolute, as well as the relative, achievements of their children.
New attitude toward intelligence.
Education and the Theory of Evolution.—A most characteristic influence in education to-day has come through the theory of evolution of Darwin (Fig. 51). This fruitful hypothesis came to be generally accepted during the last quarter of the nineteenth century as the guiding principle of education, and has constantly increased the illumination it has shed upon the educational process. It has given an entirely new meaning to education, and has greatly modified the course of study and revolutionized the method of approaching educational problems. It has wrought very much the same changesStudies of mental development in the race and individual.in the treatment of intelligence that it did in the biological sciences. Consciousness is no longer regarded as a fixed set of entities, but as a developmental process. Insteadof classifying and cataloging mental processes in fixed groups, efforts are made to study their growth from the standpoint both of the race and of the individual. Studies of mental development in the race, begun by Darwin’sDescent of Man, which recognized ‘sexual’ and ‘social selection,’ as well as ‘natural selection,’ have been continued by numerous investigators, and equally extensive researches have also been latterly made in genetic psychology, child study, mental development, and adolescence. Both observation and experimentation have been introduced into the study of mental processes. Even more revolutionary than this actual increase inChange in imagery and vocabulary.knowledge, however, is the change that has taken place in the conception, imagery, and terminology of education. Writers upon education constantly employ the language of evolution. Educational discussions are now filled with such terms as ‘variation,’ ‘selection,’ ‘adjustment,’ and ‘adaptation,’ and such concepts dominate all educational thinking. If educational leaders of half a century ago could be present to-day at a gathering of educational thinkers, they would find themselves listening to what would seem to them almost a foreign language.
Enlarging Conceptions of the Function of Education.—Such are a few of the chief tendencies and advances that are being made in education to-day. There is also a great variety of other educational movements, almost too numerous to be mentioned. In the organization and administration of the public schools there is a decided tendency toward centralization in educational activities,Centralization;corresponding to the centralization in industrial and political affairs. The United States Bureau of Educationand the various State Departments of Public Instruction have had their functions much enlarged and their activities greatly increased. There are also suchschool hygiene;matters as the new procedure in school hygiene, arising from the modern attitude toward the prevention of disease; new health regulations, as a result of having so many children housed in the same buildings; medical inspection, open-air schools, and better nourishment; andschool architecture;new tendencies in school architecture. Likewise we find progressive legislation on compulsory school attendance; more extensive training of teachers; a rapid recognitionprofessionalization of teaching.of education as a profession; the organization of various types of teachers’ associations; and the development of educational journalism. Secondary education is alsoReorganization of secondary and higher education.being greatly extended and largely reorganized. ‘Junior high schools,’ combining the upper grades of the elementary school with the lower grades of the secondary school, and thus bridging the gap, are being widely introduced into American cities, and a variety of propositions for a six-year course are being seriously entertained. In connection with higher education there are such new tendencies as university extension, correspondence courses, summer sessions, university interest in the practical problems of the people, the correlation of the first two years of college with the secondary school, more flexible entrance requirements, an increasing number of fields of professional work, and, above all, the professional training of teachers through Departments of Education, Teachers Colleges, and Schools of Education. With this is connected the scientific study of Education, both in graduate courses and independent investigations.
Similar efforts to secure economy, guard health, improveOther progressive tendencies.method, and cause education to serve democratic ideals are everywhere apparent. Educational theory and practice are in a constant flux, and have entered upon a most distinctive epoch of experimentation, change, and improvement. While such a situation is not without its perils, and each proposal should be carefully scrutinized before acceptance, the present tendencies are in the main a sign of progress and life.
Graves,In Modern Times(Macmillan, 1913), chap. XI; Monroe,Textbook(Macmillan, 1905), chaps. XIII-XIV. For the special tendencies mentioned, the following works may be consulted: Cooley, E. G.,Vocational Education in Europe(Chicago Commercial Club, 1912); Hanus, P. H.,Beginnings in Industrial Education(Houghton, Mifflin, 1908); Haskins, C. W.,Business Education and Accounting(Harper, 1904); Adler, F.,Moral Instruction of Children(Appleton, 1895); Palmer, G. H.,Ethical and Moral Instruction in Schools(Houghton, Mifflin, 1909); Goddard, H. H.,Education of Defectives(Monroe’s Cyclopædia of Education); Bell, A. G.,Deaf Mute Instruction in Relation to the Work of the Public Schools; Armitage, T.,Education and Employment of the Blind(Harrison & Sons, London, 1886); Dewey, J.,The School and Society(University of Chicago Press, 1899), andElementary School Record(University of Chicago Press, 1900); Montessori, Maria,The Montessori Method(Translated by Anne E. George, Stokes Co., New York, 1912); Kilpatrick, W. H.,The Montessori Method Examined(Houghton, Mifflin, 1914); Ayres, L. P.,Measuring Educational Processes through Educational Results(School Review, May, 1912); Strayer, G. D.,Standards and Tests for Measuring the Efficiency of Schools(Report of the Committee of the National Council of Education in theUnited States Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1913, No. 13); Thorndike, E. L.,The Measurement of Educational Products(School Review, May, 1912).
Evolution in education may be interpreted from the standpoint of the development of individualism. Individualism was first fully recognized in the teachings of Christ, but was repressed during the Middle Ages. While it reappeared during the Renaissance, Reformation, and other movements, it soon lapsed, but a complete break from tradition occurred with Rousseau in the eighteenth century.For a time individualism dominated, but education since then has endeavored to afford latitude to the individual without losing sight of the welfare of society.
Evolution in education may be interpreted from the standpoint of the development of individualism. Individualism was first fully recognized in the teachings of Christ, but was repressed during the Middle Ages. While it reappeared during the Renaissance, Reformation, and other movements, it soon lapsed, but a complete break from tradition occurred with Rousseau in the eighteenth century.
For a time individualism dominated, but education since then has endeavored to afford latitude to the individual without losing sight of the welfare of society.
The Development of Individualism.—The discussion of present day tendencies that has just been given, together with the account of educational evolution in the preceding chapters, serves to show how far modern times have progressed in the ideals and practice of education. This may perhaps be best appreciated from the standpoint of the development of individualism. To follow such an interpretation back to the beginning of the history of education, it may be stated that during the dayProgress of individualistic tendencies during the days of primitive man,of primitive man no real distinction was made between society and the individual, and practically all advancement was impossible, for no one looked much beyond the present. With the appearance of the transitionalOriental nations,period in the Oriental countries, the individual had begunto emerge, but was kept in constant subjection to the social whole, for man was quite enslaved to the past.Jewish, Athenian, and Roman civilizations,As the Jewish, Athenian, and Roman civilizations developed, the beginnings of individualism were for the first time clearly revealed, and some regard was had for the future. Then, through the teachings of Christ,Christian development,there came to be a larger recognition of the principle of individualism and the brotherhood of man. Owing to a necessity for spreading these enlarged ideals among a barbarous horde of peoples, individualism was repressed,and the Middle Ages;and throughout the Middle Ages the keynote was submission to authority and preparation for the life to come. The cultural products of Greece and Rome largely disappeared, and all civilization became restricted, fixed, and formal.
But the human spirit could not be forever held in bondage, and, after almost a millennium of repression and uniformity, various factors that had accumulated within the Middle Ages produced an intellectual awakeningthe Renaissance,that we know as the ‘Renaissance.’ Its vitality lasted during the fifteenth century in Italy and to the close of the sixteenth in the Northern countries, but by the dawn of the seventeenth century it had everywhere degenerated into a dry and mechanical study of the classics. This constituted a formalism almost as dense as that it had superseded, except that linguistic and literary studies had replaced dialectic and theology. A little later than the spread of the Renaissance, though overlappingthe Reformation,it somewhat, came the allied movement of the ‘Reformation.’ This grew in part out of the disposition of the Northern Renaissance to turn to social and moral account the revived intelligence and learning. Yet herealso the revival failed in its mission, and the tendency to rely upon reason rather than dogma hardened into formalism and a distrust of individualism. Again, in the seventeenth century, apparently as an outgrowth of the same forces, intellectual activity took the form of a search for ‘real things.’ The movement that culminatedand realism;in ‘sense realism’ appeared, but this small and crude beginning of the modern scientific tendency was for some decades yet held within limits. Associated with this realistic tendency, on the religious and political sides also appeared a quickening in such forms as ‘Puritanism’Puritanism and Pietism;and ‘Pietism,’ which likewise degenerated eventually into a fanaticism and hypocrisy.
The Harmonization of the Individual and Society.—Thusand Rousseau and the destructive tendency.the way was opened for the complete break with tradition and authority that occurred in the eighteenth century. This tendency, while in France at least most destructive and costly, was the inevitable result of the unwillingness to reshape society and education in accordance with changing ideals and conditions. Hence Rousseau undertook to shatter all educational traditions. But his recommendation of isolated education, so palpable in its fallacies, prepared the ground for the numerous social, scientific, and psychological tendencies (seepp. 218-222) that were destined to spring up in modern education and for the consequent improvement in the aim, organization, content, and method of education. Of course modern education has advanced infinitely beyond anything implied by Rousseau or even the later reformers of the past century, but it is out of his attempts at destruction that has grown this nobler structure. For a time individualism triumphed andground authority under its heel, but when this extremity had been passed, the problem became how to harmonize the individual with society, and to develop personality progressively in keeping with its environment. Thus the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have put forth conscious efforts to justify the eighteenth and to bringThe present tendencies in education seem to harmonize the individual interest with those of society.out and develop the positions barely hinted at in its negations. It is not alone the individual as such that has been of interest in the modern period, but more and more the individual in relation to the social whole to which he belongs, as only in this way can the value of his activities be estimated.
This is revealed in the works of those who followed Rousseau, and especially in the attempts of recentRecent definitions of education show this.educational philosophers to frame a definition of education that shall recognize the importance of affording latitude to the individual without losing sight of the welfare of the social environment in connection with which his efforts are to function. Thus Butler, though recognizing the individual factor, especially stresses the social by declaring education to be “the gradual adjustment of the individual to the spiritual possessions of the race.” Then he further declares: “When we hear it sometimes said, ‘All education must start from the child,’ we must add, ‘Yes, and lead into human civilization;’ and when it is said on the other hand that ‘all education must start from a traditional past,’ we must add, ‘Yes, and be adapted to the child.’” And the balance between the two factors of the individual and society is even more explicitly preserved in Dewey’s statement “that the psychological and social sides are organically related, and that education cannot be regardedas a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other.” In the same way Bagley has made ‘social efficiency’ the main aim in educating the individual to-day, and both elements are carefully considered by all modern writers in discussing educational values. Thus the central problem in education of the twentieth and succeeding centuries is to beThe educational problem of the future.a constant reorganization of the curriculum and methods of teaching, and this reconstruction must be such as to harmonize a due regard for the progressive variations of the individual with the welfare of the conservative institutions of society. It must include a continual effort to hand on the intellectual possessions of the race, but also to stimulate all individuals to add some modification or new element to the product. In this way there may develop unending possibilities for both the individual and society.
Graves, F. P.,History of Education before the Middle Ages(Macmillan, 1909), chap. XII;History of Education during the Transition(Macmillan, 1910), chap. XXIII;History of Education in Modern Times(Macmillan, 1913), chap. XII; Monroe, P.,Textbook in the History of Education(Macmillan, 1905), chap. X.