Essentials in EducationBy Mary Snow(Supervisor, Household Arts and Science, Board of Education, Chicago. From “The Child in the City.”)
By Mary Snow
(Supervisor, Household Arts and Science, Board of Education, Chicago. From “The Child in the City.”)
Certainly some essential is missing. Children are not dull about significant truths. They wish to know how to read and to write and to manipulate number processes. They have wholesome and often keen interest in the movements and experiences of people and the great figures in history; they work hard and cheerfully to know somewhat of the countries of the earth. Musical expression satisfies and delights them. Art entices them up to the point where they find that it misses practical application, and then interest dies and with it expression. Then they begin to reach after further reality with passionate earnestness. They long to express themselves in tangible ways. They have a right consciously to experience the sensations of knowing that they know and knowing that they can do. If opportunity for “doing” has been opened to them, they will have gained in strength of character through their authoritative wills commanding their powers, and the purposive and co-ordinatework of the motor phases of education will have furnished a kind of test of progress, a mental verification of accomplishment that can never come through any academic work. They have many measuring rods in the evaluation of the finished task—the eye, the muscular tension, judgment, comparison, trial. There is necessary integrity since no amount of vanity will make the tangible result reveal anything but truth. William James, with ever brilliant insight, said that manual training did more for the moral strength of youth than any other subject in the curriculum.