XIIWHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION?
At a time when more people are thinking intelligently about American education than ever before, it is unfortunate that there should be any confusion between the widely diverse trails that experimentation is opening up to the modern school. It is becoming increasingly evident that the “experimental” in education does not at all mean the same thing to educational administrators as it does to educational idealists. “Experimental education” has not yet been pitted in competition against the “experimental school,” but it is not unlikely that the different techniques which they suggest may come to seem hostile to each other, and so the real values of both be lost. At present the two seem to be developing in a fairly complete disregard of each other. It would be dangerous for American education to tangle itself in the dilemma of choosing between them. On the other hand, it would be even more disastrousto confuse them. If we attempt to apply the quantitative standards of the new “experimental education” to the life of the “experimental school,” or to infuse the qualitative ideals of the “experimental school” into the technique of “experimental education,” we run the risk of spoiling that modern and socially-adjusted school towards which we are all feeling our way.
When the inventive school superintendent or professor of education speaks of “experimental education,” he is thinking, not of the “model school,” but of the new standard tests in the fundamental subjects by which the work of large masses of public school children is being regularly measured and compared. The city school survey has elaborated a technique of intellectual measurements which is giving us very rapidly a genuine quantitative science of education. A report like Professor Judd’s in the “Cleveland Survey”—“Measuring the Work of the Public Schools”—is a storehouse of suggestiveness for all who like to see how mathematics can be fruitfully applied to living. These statistical studies measure accurately the performance of children in the different grades and at different ages in the specific literateskills which everybody needs even to start fairly in the race of opportunity. The standard tests have been worked out experimentally with great numbers of school-children so that average norms of accomplishment can be set for any class or any individual. Rates of speed and quality of handwriting, and their relation to each other; ability to spell common words; rate and capacity of accurate figuring; rate and quality of silent and oral reading;—these are the aptitudes that are rigidly measured by the tests. The children are treated as segregated arithmetical minds, reading minds, spelling minds, as units of intellectual behavior. The tests are not “examinations,” for they do not aim to show any absolute attainment of “knowledge.” Their value is in the comparison they afford of individual skill, and of deviations from a norm of effectiveness. In the mass of scores you have an intellectual relief map of your class, your school, your city system.
Now nothing could apparently be more deadly and mechanical than this treating of living children as if they were narrowly isolated minds. In this “experimental education” we are evidently in another world from the “experimental school.” Yet out of these tests emerge themost important implications for modern education. Out of this “experimental education” we at last get a scientific basis for the “modern school.” For we have irrefutable proof of the enormous diversity of minds and aptitudes. We have a demonstration of the utter foolishness of subjecting children to a uniform educational process. We have accurate proof of the fallacy of the “average” in education. These tests are added proof of the unscientific character of the typical public school on that very technical and administrative side which has been most carefully developed. The graded school was a brilliant invention for its time, but the bases of classification are shown by these new tests to be absurd. Children are now classified, for purposes of education, largely by age and average standing. The tests show that neither category has the slightest relevance for effective learning. We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than useless. But mere numerical age is no clue whatsoever to mental or even physiological age, and minds with the same average may plot out very differently for every individual one of the various skills and interests thatelementary training involves. Our educational grading has been as sentimental and sterile as the ancient philosophers’ classification of matter into earth, water, fire, air. Such a conception of the world was interesting, but there was nothing you could do with it. All the school has done with its classifying has been to get the children into groups where they could be dosed with an orderly sequence of lessons. There has been no handle by which their heterogeneous minds and wills could be taken hold of and directed. The rule of the classroom is necessarily military, because such diverse people could only be unified in the most objective and external and coercive way. No internal control would be possible. So the teacher must devote a large part of her educational energy to the mere business of policing. When she actually “taught,” it was only the average child that she could really address—the fairly bright mediocrity. The other pupils wasted their time almost in direct proportion to their deviation above or below that average. Children passed up through their educational life on the basis of an “average mark,” which represented nothing whatever but a number. The standard tests have shown repeatedly that ability is so unevenlydistributed that the brightest fourth-year children overlap the poorest eighth-year children. However children may average, scarcely two children in the same class will ever be found to have the identical capacity in the different subjects. The tests reveal not only that children differ, but just how curiously and widely they do differ.
The traditional classification is enough to wreck any educational system, even without the deadness of the curriculum. With the progressive congestion of the public schools, teaching has become more and more impossible. The traditional system of grading has successfully resisted most improvement in teaching, and vitiated the newer values that have been brought into the school. If children, clearly not defective, cannot learn arithmetic, read slowly and unintelligently, spell chaotically and write a slovenly hand, question the grading system. Never have there been such admirable techniques for teaching these fundamental things. But the classification defies them. The “class” gives the teacher no leverage for improving the children’s skill. An unscientific grading is as much a barrier to altering minds as it is to changing materials.
These truths seem elementary and obvious, yet we had to wait for this “experimental education” to shake complacency in the “graded school.” Now if we accept these tests we have to conclude that it is useless to grade children for education unless those “grades” correspond accurately and specifically to the capacities of the children. Work must be done in each specific subject with—and only with—those who have approximately the same capacity. The “average” is totally unknown in that “real life” which we are constantly forced to set up in antithesis to the school. In no function of life is any one going to be judged by a composite ability to read, write, spell, figure. One succeeds not through any average skill or average information, but through the ability to throw all one’s skill and all one’s intelligence where it is demanded. A measurement of intelligence by averages will always produce just that ineffectiveness and vagueness for which the products of the public school are censured at present.
The fallacy of the educational “average” involves another fallacy, equally obvious but equally prevalent. This is the fallacy of the “partially perfect.” The school ranks the seventyper cent. child equal to the hundred per cent. child. Children pass to more difficult work on an admitted basis of imperfect accomplishment. But for any real effectiveness in the world it is not enough to be habitually only seventy per cent. right. Whenever you need to be literate, the world demands that you be actually literate. If you have information, you are either useless or dangerous unless your information is accurate. It is better not to know arithmetic at all than persistently to make only seven hits out of ten. For all practical purposes your child is as much a failure at seventy per cent. as he is at zero per cent. It will avail him little to be able to read and write and figure at a rate and an excellence only seventy per cent. of the standard. In any situation which requires these elementary skills he will be almost as much handicapped as if he were entirely illiterate. It is time that the school faced the bitter truth that life demands an approximate perfection in whatever one tries to do. Education must shape all its technique towards this approximate perfection. It is not necessary that all should do the same thing. But it is necessary that what one pretends to do one should succeed gradually in doing. The individualwho is allowed to persist continuously on a level of imperfect accomplishment is not being educated. For him education is a failure. He should either drop his technique, or ways should be found to improve him towards mastery. What children are learning at any one time they should be learning with a sense of control. The more difficult should not be confronted till the less difficult has been absorbed. And this controlled progress will be possible only in a school where children work with their equals. Classification in education should be based only on specific proficiency.
The new “experimental education” is engaged in making dramatic in the schools these truths. It is a force even more revolutionary than the idealism of the “experimental school.” The situation suggested by the “curve of distribution” is one of the most momentous facts to be reckoned with by us of to-day. It is making over our theories of democracy, social reform and social progress. To work out its manifold implications in the school is to touch the very nerve of our democratic future.