THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION
by
ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
Part 15 out of 18
the household arts into their elementary schools, but since that time the
work has been extended to practically all cities, and to many towns and
rural communities as well.
[Illustration: FIG. 228. REDIRECTED MANUAL TRAINING
A boy mending his shoe instead of making a mortice-joint ]
CONTRIBUTION OF THE MANUAL-ACTIVITIES IDEA. These new forms of school work
were at first advocated on the grounds of formal discipline--that they
trained the reasoning, exercised the powers of observation, and
strengthened the will. The "exercises," true to such a conception, were
quite formal and uniform for all. With the breakdown of the "faculty
psychology," and the abandonment in large part of the doctrine of formal
discipline in the training of the mind, the whole manual-training and
household-arts work has had to be reshaped. As the writings of Pestalozzi,
Herbart, and Froebel were studied more closely, and with the new light on
child development gained from child-study and the newer psychology, these
new subjects came to be conceived of in their proper light as means of
individual expression, and to be extended to new forms, materials, colors,
and new practical and artistic ends. To-day the instruction in manual work
and the household arts in all their forms has been further changed to make
of them educational instruments for interpreting the fields of art and
industry and home-life in terms of their social significance and
usefulness. Through these two new forms of education, also, the pupils in
the elementary schools have been given training in expression and an
insight into the practical work of life impossible in the old textbook
type of elementary school. In the kindergarten, manual work, and the
household arts, Froebel's principle of education through directed self-
activity and self-expression has borne abundant fruit.
In the hands of French, English, and American educators the original
manual-arts idea has been greatly expanded. In France some form of
expression has been worked out for all grades of the primary school, and
the work has been closely connected with art and industry on the one hand
and with the home-life of the people on the other. In England the project
system as applied to industry, and the household arts with reference to
home-life, have been emphasized. In the United States the work has been
individualized perhaps more than anywhere else, applied in many new
directions--clay, leather, cement, metal--and used as a very important
instrument for self-expression and the development of individual thinking.
IV. THE ADDITION OF SCIENCE STUDY
THE GRADUAL EXTENSION OF THE INTEREST IN SCIENCE. A very prominent feature
of world educational development, since about the middle of the nineteenth
century, has been the general introduction into the schools of the study
of science. It is no exaggeration of the importance of this to say that no
addition of new subject-matter and no change in the direction and purpose
of education, since that time, has been of greater importance for the
welfare of mankind, or more significant of new world conditions, than has
been the emphasis recently placed, in all divisions of state school
systems, on instruction in the principles and the applications of science.
From the days of Francis Bacon (p. 390) on, the study of science has been
making slow but steady progress. The early history of modern science we
traced in chapter XVII. During the seventeenth century English scholars
were most prominent in the further development, due largely to the greater
tolerance of new ideas there, and the University of Cambridge early
attained to some reputation (p. 423) as a place where instruction in the
new scientific studies might be found. After the middle of the eighteenth
century, in large part due to the illuminating work of Voltaire (p. 485),
a great interest in science arose among the French. In the Revolutionary
days we accordingly find the French creating important scientific
institutions (p. 518), and Napoleon gave frequent evidence of his deep
interest in scientific studies. [24] This interest the French have since
retained.
From France this new interest in science passed quickly to the Germans.
The new mathematical and physical studies had early found a home at the
new University of Goettingen (p. 555), and largely under French influences
scientific studies were later introduced into all the German universities.
Early in the nineteenth century the German universities took the lead as
centers for the new scientific studies (p. 576)--a lead they retained
throughout the century. In England the universities had, by the nineteenth
century, lost much of their seventeenth-century prominence in science, and
had settled down into teaching colleges, instead of developing, as had the
German universities, into institutions for scientific research. Compared
with the reformed German universities, actuated by the new scientific
spirit, the English universities of the mid-nineteenth century presented a
very unfavorable [25] aspect (R. 359). In the United States, book
instruction in the sciences came in near the close of the eighteenth
century, but the first laboratory instruction in our colleges was not
begun until 1846, and our real interest in science teaching dates from an
even later period. Until the coming of German influences, after the middle
of the century, the American college [26] largely followed English models
and practices.
Yet, as we pointed out earlier, the early nineteenth century witnessed a
vast expansion of scientific knowledge, and by 1860 the main keys of
modern science (p. 727) were in the hands of scholars everywhere. The
great early development of scientific study had been carried on in a few
universities or had been done by independent scholars, and had influenced
but little instruction in the colleges or the schools below.
SCIENCE INSTRUCTION REACHES THE SCHOOLS BUT SLOWLY. The textbook
organization of this new scientific knowledge, for teaching purposes, and
its incorporation into the instruction of the schools, took place but
slowly.
1. _The elementary schools._ The greatest and the earliest success was
made in German lands. There the pioneer work of Basedow (p. 534) and the
Philanthropinists had awakened a widespread interest in scientific
studies. In Switzerland, too, Pestalozzi had developed elementary science
study and home geography, and, when Pestalozzian methods were introduced
into the schools of Prussia, the study of elementary science (_Realien_)
soon became a feature of the _Volksschule_ instruction. From Prussia it
spread to all German lands. In England the Pestalozzian idea was
introduced into the Infant Schools, [27] though in a very formal fashion,
under the heading of object lessons. In this form elementary science study
reached the United States, about 1860, though a decade later well-
organized courses in elementary science instruction began to be introduced
into the American elementary schools. [28]
After the political reaction following the Napoleonic wars had set in, on
the continent of Europe, all thought-provoking studies were greatly
curtailed in the people's schools. In England, for other reasons, object
lessons did not make any marked headway, and as late as 1865 practically
nothing relating to the great new world of scientific knowledge had as yet
been introduced into the private and religious elementary schools (R. 360)
which, up to that time, constituted England's chief dependence for the
elementary instruction of her people.
2. _The secondary schools._ In the secondary schools the earliest work of
importance in introducing the new scientific subjects was done by the
Germans and the French. In German lands the _Realschule_ obtained an early
start (1747; p. 420), and the instruction in mathematics and science it
included [29] had begun to be adopted by the German secondary schools,
especially in the South German States, before the period of reaction set
in. During the reign of Napoleon the scientific course in the French
_Lycees_ was given special prominence. After about 1815, and continuing
until after 1848, practical and thought-provoking studies were under an
official ban in both countries, and classical studies were specially
favored. [30] Finally, in 1852 in France and in 1859 in Prussia,
responding to changed political conditions and new economic demands, both
the scientific course in the _Lycees_ and the _Realschulen_ were given
official recognition, and thereafter received increasing state favor and
support. The scientific idea also took deep root in Denmark. There the
secondary schools were modernized, in 1809, when the sciences were given
an important place, and again in 1850, when many of the Latin schools were
transformed into _Realskoler_.
In the United States the academies and the early high schools both had
introduced quite an amount of mathematics and book-science, [31] and,
after about 1875, the development of laboratory instruction in science in
the growing high schools took place rather rapidly. Fellenberg's work in
Switzerland (p. 546) had also awakened much interest in the United States,
and by 1830 a number of Schools of Industry and Science had begun to
appear. [32] These made instruction in mathematics and science prominent
features of their work. After the Napoleonic wars, England attained to
the first place as an industrial and commercial nation. This led to a
continual agitation on the part of manufacturers for some science and art
instruction. In 1853, Parliament created a State Department of Science and
Art (p. 638), and the promotion of science and art education by government
grants was now begun. Though the nation had been the first to be
transformed by the industrial revolution, and its foreign trade by 1850
reached all parts of the world, the secondary schools of England had
remained largely untouched by the change. They were still mainly the
Renaissance Latin grammar schools they had been ever since Dean Colet
(1510) marked out the lines for such instruction by founding his reformed
grammar school at St. Pauls (p. 275). Their courses of instruction
contained little that was modern, and in their aims and purposes they went
back to the days of the Revival of Learning for their inspiration (R.
361).
THE CHALLENGE OF HERBERT SPENCER. By the middle of the nineteenth century
the scientific and industrial revolutions had produced important changes
in the conditions of living in all the then important world nations.
Particularly in the German States, France, England, and the United States
had the effects of the revolutions in manufacturing and living been felt.
In consequence there had been, for some time, a growing controversy
between the partisans of the older classical training and the newer
scientific studies as to their relative worth and importance, both for
intellectual discipline and as preparation for intelligent living, and by
the middle of the nineteenth century this had become quite sharp. The
"faculty psychology," upon which the theory of the discipline of the
powers of the mind by the classics was largely based, was attacked, and
the contention was advanced that the content of studies was of more
importance in education than was method and drill. The advocates of the
newer studies contended that a study of the classics no longer provided a
suitable preparation for intelligent living, and the question of the
relative worth of the older and newer studies elicited more and more
discussion as the century advanced.
[Illustration: FIG. 229. HERBERT SPENCER (1820-1903)]
In 1859 one of England's greatest scholars, Herbert Spencer, brought the
whole question to a sharp issue by the publication of a remarkably
incisive essay on "What Knowledge is of Most Worth?" In this he declared
that the purpose of education was to "prepare us for complete living," and
that the only way to judge of the value of an educational course was first
to classify, in the order of their importance, [33] the leading activities
and needs of life, and then measure the course of study by how fully it
offers such a preparation. Doing so (R. 362), and applying such a test, he
concluded that of all subjects a knowledge of science (R. 363) "was always
most useful for preparation for life," and therefore the type of knowledge
of most worth. In three other essays [34] he recommended a complete change
from the classical type of training which had dominated English secondary
education since the days of the Renaissance. Still more, instead of a few
being educated by a "cultural discipline" for a life of learning and
leisure, he urged general instruction in science, that all might receive
training and help for the daily duties of life.
These essays attracted wide attention, not only in England but in many
other lands as well. They were a statement, in clear and forceful English,
of the best ideas of the educational reformers for three centuries. In his
statement of the principles upon which sound intellectual education should
be based he merely enunciated theses for which educational reformers had
stood since the days of Ratke and Comenius. In his treatment of moral and
physical education he voiced the best ideas of John Locke. Spencer's great
service was in giving forceful expression to ideas which, by 1860, had
become current, and in so doing he pushed to the front anew the question
of educational values. The scientific and industrial revolutions had
prepared the way for a redirection of national education, and the time was
ripe in England, France, German lands, and the United States for such a
discussion. As a result, though the questions he raised are still in part
unsettled, a great change in assigned values has since been effected not
only in these nations, but in most other nations and lands which have
drawn the inspiration for their educational systems from them. Though his
work was not specially original, we must nevertheless class Herbert
Spencer as one of the great writers on educational aims and purposes, and
his book as one of the great influences in reshaping educational practice.
He gave a new emphasis to the work of all who had preceded him, and out of
the discussion which ensued came a new and a greatly enlarged estimate as
to the importance of science study in all divisions of the school.
[Illustration: FIG. 230. THOMAS H. HUXLEY (1825-95)]
THE NEW EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE. It is perhaps not too much to say that out of
Spencer's gathering-up and forceful statement of the best ideas of his
time, and the discussion which followed, a new conception of the
educational purpose as adjustment to the life one is to live--physical,
economic, social, moral, political--was clearly formulated, and a new
definition of a liberal education was framed. The former found expression
in a rather rapid introduction of science-study into the elementary
school, the secondary school, and the college, after about 1865, in the
school systems of all progressive nations, and the subsequent extension of
the scientific method to such new fields as history, politics, government,
and social welfare. The latter--the new definition of a liberal education
--was wonderfully well stated in an address (1868) by the English
scientist, Thomas Huxley, when he said: [35]
That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with
ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of
equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam
engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as
well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a
knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the
laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life
and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous
will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all
beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to
respect others as himself.
Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for
he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will
make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together
rarely: she as his ever-beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her
conscious self, her minister and interpreter.
The inter-relation between the movement for the study of the sciences and
the other movements for the improvement of instruction which we have so
far described in this chapter, was close. Pestalozzi had emphasized
instruction in geography and the study of nature; Froebel had given a
prominent place to nature study and school gardening; the manual-arts work
tended to exhibit industrial processes and relationships; and the
scientific emphasis on content rather than drill was in harmony with the
theories of all the modern reformers. Still more, the scientific movement
was in close harmony with the new individualistic tendency of the early
part of the nineteenth century, and with the movements for the improvement
of individual and national welfare which have been so prominent a
characteristic of the latter half of the century.
V. SOCIAL MEANING OF THESE CHANGES
A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. Pestalozzi, true to the individualistic spirit of
the age in which he lived and worked, had seen education as an individual
development, and the ends of education as individual ends. The spirit of
the French Revolutionary period was the spirit of individualism. With the
progress of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent rise of new
social problems, the emphasis was gradually shifted from the individual to
society--from the single man to the man in the mass. The first educational
thinker of importance to see and clearly state this new conception in
terms of the school was Herbart. Seeing the educational purpose in far
clearer perspective than had those who had gone before him, he showed that
education must have for its function the preparation of man to live in
organized society, and that character and social morality, rather than
individual development, must in consequence be the larger aims. Froebel,
possessed of something of the same insight, and seeing clearly the
educational importance of activity and expression, had opened up for
children a wealth of new contacts with the world about them in the new
type of educational institution which he created. His principles, he said,
when thoroughly worked out and applied to education "would revolutionize
the world." He did not complete the full educational organization he had
planned, but in the hands of the Swedes and Finns similar ideas were
worked out in practical form and made a part of school work. Applying
Froebel's idea to instruction in the old trades and industries, declining
in importance in the face of the rise of the factory system, they evolved
the manual-training activities, and these have since been made important
tools for giving to young people some intelligent ideas as to the
industrial relationships and economic problems of our complex modern life.
Since this early pioneer work changes in school work have been numerous
and of far-reaching importance. The methods and purpose of instruction in
the older subjects have been revised; new studies, which would serve to
interpret to the young the industrial and social revolutions of the
nineteenth century, have been introduced; the expression-subjects--the
domestic arts, music, drawing, clay-modeling, color work, the manual arts,
nature study, gardening--have given a new direction to school work; and
the study of science and the vocations has attained to a place of
importance previously unknown. During the past half-century the school has
been transformed, in the principal world nations, from a disciplinary
institution where drill in mastering the rudiments of knowledge was given,
into an instrument of democracy calculated to train young people for
living, for useful service in the office and shop and home, and to prepare
them for intelligent participation in the increasingly complex social and
political and industrial life of a modern world. This transformation of
the school has not always been easy (R. 365), but the vastly changed
conditions of modern life have demanded such a transformation in all
progressive nations.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF JOHN DEWEY. The foremost American interpreter, in
terms of the school, of the vast social and industrial changes which have
marked the nineteenth century, is John Dewey [36] (1859- ). Better perhaps
than anyone else he has thought out and stated a new educational
philosophy, suited to the changed and changing conditions of human living.
His work, both experimental and theoretical, has tended both to re-
psychologize (R. 364) and socialize education; to give to it a practical
content, along scientific and industrial lines; and to interpret to the
child the new social and industrial conditions of modern society by
connecting the activities of the school closely with those of real life.
[Illustration: FIG. 231. A REORGANIZED KINDERGARTEN
Drawn from a photograph showing the reconstruction of the kindergarten
activities, as worked out by Dewey at Chicago.]
Starting with the premises that "the school cannot be a preparation for
social life except as it reproduces the typical conditions of social
life"; that "industrial activities are the most influential factors in
determining the thought, the ideals, and the social organization of a
people"; and that "the school should be life, not a preparation for
living"; Dewey for a time conducted an experimental school, for children
from four to thirteen years of age, to give concrete expression to his
educational ideas. These, first consciously set forth by Froebel, were:
[37]
1. That the primary business of the school is to train in cooeperative
and mutually helpful living....
2. That the primary root of all educational activity is in the
instinctive, impulsive attitudes and activities of the child, and not
in the presentation and application of external material.
3. That these individual tendencies and activities are organized and
directed through the uses made of them in keeping up the cooeperative
living ... taking advantage of them to reproduce, on the child's
plane, the typical doings and occupations of the larger, maturer
society into which he is finally to go forth; and that it is through
production and creative use that valuable knowledge is clinched.
The work of this school [38] was of fundamental importance in directing
the reorganization of the work of the kindergarten along different and
larger lines, and also has been of significance in redirecting the
instruction in both the social subjects--history (R. 366), literature,
etc.--and the manual, domestic, and artistic activities of the school. In
his subsequent writings he may be said to have stated an important new
philosophy for the school in terms of modern social, political, and
industrial needs.
THE DEWEY EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY. Believing that the public school is the
chief remedy for the ills of organized society, Professor Dewey has tried
to show how to change the work of the school so as to make it a miniature
of society itself. Social efficiency, and not mere knowledge, he has
conceived to be the end, and this social efficiency is to be produced
through participation in the activities of an institution of society, the
school. The different parts of the school system thus become a unified
institution, in which children are taught how to live amid the constantly
increasing complexities of modern social and industrial life.
Education, therefore, in Dewey's conception, involves not merely learning,
but play, construction, use of tools, contact with nature, expression, and
activity; and the school should be a place where children are working
rather than listening, learning life by living life, and becoming
acquainted with social institutions and industrial processes by studying
them. The work of the school is in large part to reduce the complexity of
modern life to such terms as children can understand, and to introduce the
child to modern life through simplified experiences. Its primary business
may be said to be to train children in cooeperative and mutually helpful
living. The virtues of a school, as Dewey points out, are learning by
doing; the use of muscles, sight and feeling, as well as hearing; and the
employment of energy, originality, and initiative. The virtues of the
school in the past were the colorless, negative virtues of obedience,
docility, and submission. Mere obedience and the careful performance of
imposed tasks he holds to be not only a poor preparation for social and
industrial efficiency, but a poor preparation for democratic society and
government as well. Responsibility for good government, under any
democratic form of organization, rests with all, and the school should
prepare for the political life of to-morrow by training its pupils to meet
responsibilities, developing initiative, awakening social insight, and
causing each to shoulder a fair share of the work of government in the
school.
We have now before us the great contributions to a philosophy for the
educational process made since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Many other workers in different lands, but more particularly in German
lands, France, Italy, England, and the United States, have added their
labors to the expansion and redirection of the school. They are too
numerous to mention and, though often nationally important, need not be
included here. Still more, the contributions of Pestalozzi, Herbart,
Froebel, Spencer, Dewey, and their followers and disciples are so
interwoven in the educational theory and practice of to-day that it is in
most cases impossible to separate them from one another. [39]
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you explain the long-continued objection to teacher-training?
2. Contrast "oral and objective teaching" with the former "individual
instruction."
3. Show how complete a change in classroom procedure this involved.
4. Show how Pestalozzian ideas necessitated a "technique of instruction."
5. Why is it that Pestalozzian ideas as to language and arithmetic
instruction have so slowly influenced the teaching of grammar, language,
and arithmetic?
6. How do you explain the decline in importance of the once-popular mental
arithmetic?
7. Show how child study was a natural development from the Pestalozzian
psychology and methodology.
8. Explain what is meant by the statements that Herbart rejected:
(a) The conventional-social ideal of Locke.
(b) The unsocial ideal of Rousseau.
(c) The "faculty-psychology" conception of Pestalozzi.
9. Explain what is meant by saying that Herbart conceived of education as
broadly social, rather than personal.
10. Show in what ways and to what extent Herbart:
(a) Enlarged our conception of the educational process.
(b) Improved the instruction content and process.
11. Explain why Herbartian ideas took so much more quickly in the United
States than did Pestalozzianism.
12. State the essentials of the kindergarten idea, and the psychology
behind it.
13. State the contribution of the kindergarten idea to education.
14. Show the connection between the sense impression ideas of Pestalozzi,
the self-activity of Froebel, and the manual activities of the modern
elementary school.
15. Explain why scientific studies came into the schools so slowly, up to
about 1860, and so very rapidly after about that time.
16. Explain the particularly long resistance to the introduction of
scientific studies by industrial England.
17. State the comparative importance of content and drill in education.
18. Does the reasoning of Herbert Spencer appeal to you as sound? If not,
why not?
19. Show how the argument of Spencer for the study of science was also an
argument for a more general diffusion of educational advantages.
20. Would schools have advanced in importance as they have done had the
industrial revolution not taken place? Why?
21. Why is more extended education called for as "industrial life becomes
more diversified, its parts narrower, and its processes more concealed"?
22. Point out the social significance of the educational work of John
Dewey.
23. Point out the value, in the new order of society, of each group of
school subjects listed in footnote 1 on page 763.
24. Contrast the virtues of a school before Pestalozzi's time and those of
a modern school.
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying _Book of Readings_ the following selections
illustrative of the contents of this chapter are reproduced:
344. Bache: The German Seminaries for Teachers.
345. Bache: A German Teachers' Seminary Described.
346. Bache: A French Normal School Described.
347. Barnard: Beginnings of Teacher-Training in England.
348. Barnard: The Pupil-Teacher System Described.
349. Clinton: Recommendation for Teacher-Training Schools.
350. Massachusetts: Organizing the First Normal Schools.
(a) The Organizing Law.
(b) Admission and Instruction in.
(c) Mann: Importance of the Normal School.
351. Early Textbooks: Examples of Instruction from
(a) Davenport: History of the United States.
(b) Morse: Elements of Geography--Map.
(c) Morse Elements of Geography.
352. Murray: A Typical Teacher's Contract.
353. Bache: The Elementary Schools of Berlin in 1838.
354. Providence: Grading the Schools of.
355. Felkin: Herbart's Educational Ideas.
356. Felkin: Herbart's Educational Ideas Applied.
357. Titchener: Herbart and Modern Psychology.
358. Marenholtz-Buelow: Froebel's Educational Views.
359. Huxley: English and German Universities Contrasted.
360. Huxley: Mid-nineteenth-Century Elementary Education in England.
361. Huxley: Mid-nineteenth-Century Secondary Education in England.
362. Spencer: What Knowledge is of Most Worth?
363. Spencer: Conclusions as to the Importance of Science.
364. Dewey: The Old and New Psychology Contrasted.
365. Ping: Difficulties in Transforming the School.
(a) Relating Education to Life.
(b) The Old Teacher and the New System.
366. Dewey: Socialization of School Work illustrated by History.
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. Contrast the instruction in a German Teachers' Seminary (345) or a
French normal school (346) of 1838, as described by Bache, with that of an
American normal school of to-day.
2. What do the beginnings of teacher training in England (347, 348)
indicate as to conceptions then existing as to the educational process?
3. Show, by comparison, that the beginnings of the American normal school
were German, rather than English in origin.
4. Just what educational conditions does Governor Clinton (349) indicate
as existing in New York State, in 1827?
5. Contrast the instruction in the early Massachusetts normal schools
(350) with that in the German (345) and French (346) of about the same
time.
6. What do the three professional courses reproduced (345, 346, 350 b)
indicate as to the development of pedagogical work by about 1840?
7. Compare the textbook types, given in 351, with modern textbooks in
equivalent subjects.
8. Just what light on school teaching, in 1841, does the teacher's
contract given (352) throw?
9. State the steps in the evolution of a graded system of schools (353,
354).
10. State the essentials of Herbart's educational ideas (355,356), and the
nature of the advances made over his predecessors.
11. State the essentials of Froebel's educational ideas, as explained by
the Baroness von Marenholtz-Buelow (358).
12. Explain the difference between the universities of the two nations
(359).
13. Contrast elementary education in England (360) with that in the United
States at the same period.
14. Would you add anything else to Spencer's requirements to prepare for
complete living? What? Why?
15. How do you explain science being "written against in our theologies
and frowned upon from our pulpits" (363) when it is of such importance as
Spencer concludes?
16. Contrast the old and the new psychology (357, 364).
17. Have the difficulties experienced in the transformation of instruction
in China (365) been essentially different than with us? How?
18. Apply Dewey's idea as to the socialization of history (366) to
instruction in geography.
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES
Barnard, Henry. _National Education in Europe_.
* Bowen, H. C. _Froebel and Education through Self-Activity_.
Compayre, G. _Herbart and Education by Instruction_.
* De Garmo, Chas. _Herbart and the Herbartians_.
Dewey, John. _The School and Social Progress_. (Nine numbers.)
* Dewey, John. _The School and Society_.
Gordy, J. P. _Rise and Growth of the Normal School Idea in the United
States_. Circular of Information, United States Bureau of
Education, No. 8, 1891.
Hollis, A. P. _The Oswego Movement_.
* Jordan, D. S. "Spencer's Essay on Education"; in _Cosmopolitan
Magazine_, vol. xxix, pp. 135-49. (Sept. 1902.)
Judd, C. H. _The Training of Teachers in England, Scotland, and
Germany_. (Bulletin 35, 1914, United States Bureau of Education.)
Monroe, Will S. _History of the Pestalozzian Movement in the United
States_.
* Parker, S. C. _History of Modern Elementary Education_.
Ping Wen Kuo. _The Chinese System of Public Education_.
Spencer, Herbert. _Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical_.
Vanderwalker, N. C. _The Kindergarten in American Education_.
CHAPTER XXIX
NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS
I. POLITICAL
THE ENLARGED CONCEPTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION. The new ideas as to the
purpose and functions of the State promulgated by English and French
eighteenth-century thinkers, and given concrete expression in the American
and French revolutions near the close of the century, imparted, as we have
seen, a new meaning to the school and a new purpose to the education of a
people. In the theoretical discussion of education by Rousseau and the
empirical work of Pestalozzi a new individualistic theory for a secular
school was created, and this Prussia, for long moving in that direction,
first adopted as a basis for the state school system it early organized to
serve national ends. The new American States, also long moving toward
state organization and control, early created state schools to replace the
earlier religious schools; while the French Revolution enthusiasts
abolished the religious school and ordered the substitution of a general
system of state schools to serve their national ends.
From these beginnings, as we have seen, the state-school idea has in
course of time spread to all continents, and nations everywhere to-day
have come to feel that the maintenance of a more or less comprehensive
system of state schools is so closely connected with national welfare and
progress as to be a necessity for the State (R. 367). In consequence,
state ministries for education have been created in all the important
world nations; state and local school officials have been provided
generally to see that the state purpose in creating schools is carried
out; state normal schools for the preparation of teachers have been
established; comprehensive state school codes have been enacted or
educational decrees formulated; and constantly increasing expenditures for
education are to-day derived by taxing the wealth of the State to educate
the children of the State.
CHANGE FROM THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE. The original purpose in the
establishment of schools by the State was everywhere to promote literacy
and citizenship. Under all democratic forms of government it was also to
insure to the people the elements of learning that they might be prepared
for participation in the functions of government. [1] This is well
expressed in the quotations given (p. 525) from early American statesmen
as to the need for the education of public opinion and the diffusion of
knowledge among the people. The same ideas were expressed by French
writers and statesmen of the time, and by the English after the passage of
the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 (p. 642). With the gradual extension of
the franchise to larger and larger numbers of the people, the extension of
educational advantages naturally had to follow. The education of new
citizens for "their political and civil duties as members of society and
freemen" became a necessity, and closely followed each extension of the
right to vote. In all democratic governments the growing complexity of
modern political society has since greatly enlarged these early duties of
the school. To-day, in modern nations where general manhood suffrage has
come to be the rule, and still more so in nations which have added female
suffrage as well, the continually increasing complexity of the political,
economic, and social problems upon which the voters are expected to pass
judgment is such that a more prolonged period of citizenship education is
necessary if voters are to exercise, in any intelligent manner, their
functions of citizenship. In nations where the initiative, referendum, and
recall have been added, the need for special education along political,
economic, and social lines has been still further emphasized.
At first instruction in the common-school branches, with instruction in
morals or religion added, was regarded as sufficient. In States, such as
the German, where religious instruction was retained in the schools, this
has been made a powerful instrument in moulding the citizenship and
upholding the established order. The history of the different nations has
also been used by each as a means for instilling desired conceptions of
citizenship, and some work in more or less formal civil government has
usually been added. To-day all these means have been proven inadequate for
democratic peoples. In consequence, the work in civil government is being
changed and broadened into institutional and community civics; the work of
the elementary school is being socialized, along the lines advocated by
Dewey; and instruction in economic principles and in the functions of
government is being introduced into the secondary schools. Instead of
being made mere teaching institutions, engaged in promoting literacy and
diffusing the rudiments of learning among the electorate, schools are to-
day being called upon to grasp the significance of their political and
social relationships, and to transform themselves into institutions for
improving and advancing the welfare of the State (R. 368).
THE PROMOTION OF NATIONALITY. In Prussia the promotion of national
solidarity was early made an important aim of the school. This has in time
become a common national purpose, as there has dawned upon statesmen
generally the idea that a national spirit or culture is "an artificial
product which transcends social, religious, and economic distinctions,"
and that it "could be manufactured by education" (R. 340). In consequence
of this discovery the school has been raised to a new position of
importance in the national life, and has become the chief means for
developing in the citizenship that national unity and national strength so
desirable under present-day world conditions. In the German States, where
this function of the school has in recent times been perverted to carry
forward imperialistic national ends (R. 342); in France, where it has been
intelligently used to promote a rational type of national strength (R.
341); in Italy, where divergent racial types are being fused into a new
national unity; in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines (R. 343) where
the United States has used education to bring backward peoples up to a new
level of culture, and to develop in them firm foundations of national
solidarity; in China (R. 335) where an ancient people, speaking numerous
dialects, is making the difficult transition from an old culture to the
newer western civilization; and in Algiers and Morocco, where the spirit
of French nationality is being fused into dark-skinned tribesmen--
everywhere to-day, where public education has really taken hold on the
national life, we find the school being used for the promotion of national
solidarity and the inculcation of national ideals and national culture. To
such an extent has this become true that practically all the pressing
problems of the school to-day, in any land, find their ultimate
explanation in terms of the new nineteenth-century conceptions of
political nationality.
Since the development of world trade routes following long rail and
steamship lines, along which people as well as raw materials and
manufactured articles pass to and fro, the entrance of new and diverse
peoples into distant national groups has created a new problem of
nationalization that before the early nineteenth century was largely
unknown. Previous to the nineteenth century the problem was confined
almost entirely to peoples conquered and annexed by the fortunes of war.
To-day it is a voluntary migration of peoples, and a migration of such
proportions and from such distant and unlike civilizations that the
problem of assimilating the foreigner has become, particularly in the
English-speaking nations and colonies, to which distant and unrelated
peoples have turned in largest numbers, [2] a serious national problem.
The migration of 32,102,671 persons to the United States, between 1820 and
1914, from all parts of the world, has been a movement of peoples compared
with which the migrations of the Germanic tribes--Angles, Saxons, Jutes,
Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi, Danes, Burgundians, Huns--into the old
Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries pale into insignificance.
No such great movement of peoples was ever known before in history, and
the assimilative power of the American nation has not been equal to the
task. The World War revealed the extent of the failure to nationalize the
foreigner who has been permitted to come, and brought the question of
"Americanization" to the front as one of the most pressing problems
connected with American national education. With the world in flux
racially as it now is, the problem of the assimilation of non-native
peoples is one which the schools of every nation which offers political
and economic opportunity to other peoples must face. This has called for
the organization of special classes in the schools, evening and adult
instruction, community-center work, nationalization programs, compulsory
attendance of children, state oversight of private and religious schools,
and other forms of educational undertakings undreamed of in the days when
the State first took over the schools from the Church the better to
promote literacy and citizenship.
EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. The effects of the great industrial
and social changes which we have previously described are written large
across the work of the school. As the civilization in the leading world
nations has increased in complexity, and the ramifications of the social
and industrial life have widened, the school has been called upon to
broaden its work, and develop new types of instruction to increase its
effectiveness. An education which was entirely satisfactory for the
simpler form of social and industrial life of two generations ago has been
seen to be utterly inadequate for the needs of the present and the future.
It is the far-reaching change in social and industrial and home-life,
brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which underlies most of the
pressing problems in educational readjustment to-day. As the industrial
life of nations has become more diversified, its parts narrower, and its
processes more concealed, new and more extended training has been called
for to prepare young people for the work of life; to reveal to them
something of the intricacy and interdependence of modern political and
industrial and social groups; and to point out to them the importance of
each one's part in the national political and industrial organization.
With the ever-increasing subdivision and specialization of labor, the
danger from class subdivision has constantly increased, and more and more
the school has been called upon to instill into all a political and social
consciousness that will lead to unity amid increasing diversity, and to
concerted action for the preservation and improvement of the national
life.
More education than formerly has also been demanded to enable future
citizens to meet intelligently national and personal problems, and with
the widening of the suffrage and the spread of democratic ideas there has
come a necessary widening of the educational ladder, so that more of the
masses of the people may climb. Even in nations having the continental-
European two-class school system, larger educational opportunities for the
masses have had to be provided. This has come through the provision of
middle schools, continuation schools, higher primary schools, and people's
high schools, [3] as in Germany, France (see diagram, p. 598), the
Scandinavian countries (p. 713; R. 370), and Japan (p. 720). In nations
having an American-type educational ladder, it has led to the
multiplication of secondary schools and secondary-school courses, that a
larger and larger percentage of the people may be prepared better to meet
the increasingly complex and increasingly difficult conditions of modern
political, social, and industrial life. In the more advanced and more
democratic nations we also note the establishment of systems of evening
schools, adult instruction, university extension, science and art
instruction in special centers, the multiplication of libraries, and the
increasing use of the lecture, the stereopticon, and the public press, for
the purpose of keeping the people informed. No nation has done more to
extend the advantages of secondary education to its people than has the
United States; France has been especially prominent in adult instruction;
England has done noteworthy work with university extension and science and
art instruction; while the United States has carried the library movement
farther than any other land. All these, again, are extensions of
educational opportunity to the masses of the people in a manner undreamed
of a century ago.
UNIVERSITY EXPANSION. The modern university first attained its development
in Prussia (pp. 553-55), while in England and in the nations which drew
their inspiration from her, the teaching college, with its narrow range of
studies and disciplinary instruction (R. 331), continued to dominate
higher education until past the middle of the nineteenth century (R. 359).
The old universities of France, aside from Paris, were virtually destroyed
in the days of the Revolution, and their re-creation as effective teaching
and research institutions has been a relatively recent (1896) event. The
universities of Italy and Spain ceased to be effective teaching
institutions centuries ago, and only recently have begun to give evidences
of new life.
Within the past three quarters of a century, and in many nations within a
much shorter period of time, the university has very generally experienced
a new manifestation of popular favor, and is to-day looked upon as perhaps
the most important part, viewed from the standpoint of the future welfare
of the State, of the entire system of public instruction maintained by the
State. In it the leaders for the State are trained; in it the thinking
which is to dominate government a quarter-century later is largely done;
out of it come the creative geniuses whose work, in dozens of fields of
human endeavor, will mould the political, social, and scientific future of
the nation (R. 369). Every government depending upon a two-class school
system must of necessity draw its leaders in the professions, in
government, in pure and applied science, and in many other lines from the
small but carefully selected classes its universities train. In a
democracy, depending entirely upon drawing its future leaders from among
the mass, the university becomes an indispensable institution for the
training of leaders and for the promotion of the national welfare. In a
democratic government one of the highest functions of a university is to
educate leaders and to create the standards for democracy.
The university has, accordingly, in all lands, recently experienced a
great expansion. The German universities have been prominent modern
institutions for a century and a half. Realizing, as no other people have
done, their value in developing skilled leaders for the State, promoting
the national welfare, integrating the Empire, and as centers for building
up among students of other nationalities a good-will toward Germany, large
sums have been spent on their further development since 1871. Within the
past quarter-century new and strong French universities have been created,
[4] and old universities in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece have been
awakened to a new life. The English universities have been made over,
since 1870, and new municipal universities in Sheffield, Bristol, Leeds,
Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and London have set new standards in
English higher education. The universities of Scotland, Holland,
Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries have also recently attained to
world prominence. In Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, the
Philippines, India, Egypt, Palestine, Algiers, and South Africa, new
universities have been created to advance the national welfare. The South
American nations have also established a number of promising new
foundations, and given new life to older ones. Often nations swinging out
into the current of western civilization have developed their universities
before popular education really got under way.
In no country has the development of university instruction been more
rapid than in the United States and Canada. New and important state
universities are to-day found in most of the American States and Canadian
Provinces, some States maintaining two. These have been relatively recent
creations to serve democracy's needs, and upon the support of these state
universities large and increasing sums of money are spent annually. [5] In
no nation of the world, too, has private benevolence created and endowed
so many private universities of high rank as in the United States, [6] and
these have fallen into their proper places as auxiliary agents for the
promotion of the national welfare in government, science, art, and the
learned professions.
From small collegiate institutions with a very limited curriculum, a
century ago, stimulated in part by the German example and in part
responding to new national needs, universities to-day, in all the leading
world nations, have developed into groups of well-organized professional
schools, ministering to the great number of special needs of modern life
and government. The university development since the middle of the
nineteenth century has been greater than at any period before in world
history, and with the spread of democracy, dependent as democracy is upon
mass education to obtain its leaders, the university has become "the soul
of the State" (R. 369). The university development of the next half-
century, the world as a whole considered, may possibly surpass anything
that we have recently witnessed.
THE STATE SCHOOL SYSTEMS AS ORGANIZED. We now find state school systems
organized in all the leading world nations. In many the system of public
instruction maintained is broad and extensive, beginning often with infant
schools or kindergartens, continuing up through elementary schools, middle
schools, continuation schools, secondary schools, and normal schools, and
culminating in one or more state universities. In addition there are to-
day, in many nations, state systems of scientific and technical schools
and institutions, and vocational schools and schools for special classes,
to which we shall refer more in detail a little further on. The support of
all these systems of public instruction to-day comes largely from the
direct or indirect taxation of the wealth of the State. Being now
conceived of as essential to the welfare and progress of the State, the
State yearly confiscates a portion of every man's property and uses it to
maintain a service deemed vital to its purposes.
The sums spent to-day on education by modern States seem enormous,
compared with the sums spent for education under conditions existing a
century ago. In England, for example, where the first national aid was
granted, in 1833, in the form of a parliamentary grant of L20,000
(approximately $100,000), the parliamentary grants for elementary schools
had reached approximately L12,000,000 by 1910, with an additional national
aid for universities of over L1,100,000. The year following the World War
the grants were L32,853,111. In France a treasury grant of 50,000 francs
(approximately $10,000) was first made for primary schools, in 1816. This
was doubled in 1829, and in 1831 was raised to a million francs. By 1850,
the state aid for primary education had reached 3,000,000 francs; by 1870,
10,000,000 francs; by 1880, 30,000,000; and by 1914, approximately
220,000,000 francs. In addition the State was paying out 25,000,000 francs
for secondary schools, and 10,000,000 francs for universities. In the
United States the total expenditures for maintenance only of public
elementary and secondary schools was $69,107,612, in 1870-71; had reached
$214,964,618 by the end of the nineteenth century; and was $640,717,053 in
1915-16, with an additional $101,752,542 for universities. By 1920 the
total expenditures for the maintenance of public elementary, secondary,
and higher education in the United States will probably total a billion
dollars. These rapidly increasing expenditures merely record the changing
political conception as to the national importance of enlarging the
educational opportunities and advantages of those who are to constitute
and direct the future State.
II. SCIENTIFIC
In no phase of the remarkable educational development made by nations,
since the middle of the nineteenth century, has there been a more
important expansion of the educational service than in the creation of
schools dealing with the applications of science to the affairs of the
national life. Still more, no extension of instruction into new fields has
ever yielded material benefits, increased productivity, alleviated
suffering, or multiplied comforts and conveniences as has this new
development in applied scientific education during the past three quarters
of a century.
SCIENCE INSTRUCTION IN THE SCHOOLS. At first this new work came in, as we
have seen (p. 774), but slowly, and its introduction into the secondary
schools of France, Germany, England, the United States, and other nations
for a time met with bitter opposition from the partisans of the older type
of intellectual training. In Germany it was not until after Emperor
William II came to the throne (1888) that the _Realschulen_ really found a
warm partisan, he demanding (1890), in the name of the national welfare,
that the secondary schools "depart entirely from the basis that has
existed for centuries--the old monastic education of the Middle Ages"--and
that "young Germans and not young Greeks and Romans" be trained in the
schools (R. 368). During his reign the _Realschulen_ (six-year course) and
_Oberrealschulen_ (nine-year course) were especially favored, while
permission to found additional _Gymnasien_ became hard to obtain. The
scientific course in the French _Lycees_ similarly did not prosper until
after the coming of the Third Republic (1871) and the rise of modern
scientific and industrial demands. In England it was not until after 1870
that the endowed secondary schools began to include science instruction,
and laboratory instruction in the sciences began to be introduced into the
secondary schools of the United States at about the same time. In the
United States, too, the first manual-training high school was not
established until 1880, but by 1890 the creation of such schools was
clearly under way. Other nations--Switzerland, Holland, the Scandinavian
countries--also began to include laboratory science instruction in the
work of their secondary schools at about the same time. The decade of the
seventies witnessed a rising interest in instruction in science which
carried such work into the secondary schools of all progressive nations.
To-day, in nearly all lands, we find secondary-school courses in science,
or special secondary schools for scientific instruction, occupying a
position of at least equal importance with the older classical courses or
schools. As science instruction has become organized, and a knowledge of
the principles of science has become diffused, object lessons, _Realien_,
nature study, or elementary science instruction has very generally been
put into the elementary or people's schools for the younger pupils. As a
result, young people finishing the elementary schools to-day know more
relating to the laws of the universe, and the applications of these laws
to human life and industry, than did distinguished scholars two centuries
ago.
All this work in the elementary schools, middle schools, people's high
schools, secondary schools, or special technical schools of middle or
secondary grade has been of much value in diffusing scientific knowledge
and scientific methods of thinking and working among large numbers of
people, as well as in revealing to many the possibilities of a scientific
career. The great and important development of scientific instruction,
however, since about 1860, has been in the fields of advanced applied
science or technical education, and has taken place chiefly in new and
higher specialized schools and research foundations. The fields in which
the greatest scientific advances have been made, and to which we shall
here briefly refer, have been engineering, agriculture, and medicine.
THE BEGINNINGS OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION. The beginnings of technical
education were made earliest in France, Germany, and the United States,
and in the order named. France and German lands, but particularly France,
inherited through the monasteries what survived of the old Roman skills
and technical arts. In the building of bridges, roads, fortifications,
aqueducts, and imposing public buildings, the Romans had shown the
possession of engineering ability of a high order. Some of this knowledge
was retained by the monks of the early Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the
monasteries they erected and the churches they built. Later it passed to
others, and is evidenced in the great cathedrals and town halls of Europe,
and particularly of northern France. In military and civil engineering
the French were also the true successors of the Romans. As early as 1747 a
special engineering school for bridges and highways (_Ecole des Ponts et
Chaussees_) had been created, and a little later a special school to train
mining engineers (_Ecole des Mines_) was added. These were the first of
the world's higher technical schools. After the Revolution, the new need
for military and medical knowledge, as well as the general French interest
in applied science, led to the creation of a large number of important
higher technical institutions (list, p. 518), most of which have persisted
to the present and been enlarged and extended with time. Napoleon also
created a School of Arts and Trades (R. 282), and a number of military
schools (p. 590).
In German lands there was early founded a series of trade schools, [7]
which have in time been developed into important technical universities.
After the creation of the Imperial German Empire, in 1871, these schools
were especially favored by the government, and their work was raised to a
rank equal to that of the older universities. To the excellent training
given in these institutions the German leadership in applied science and
industry, before 1914, was largely due. [8] It has been the particular
function of these technical universities to apply scientific knowledge to
the industries and the arts, and to show the technical schools beneath and
the directors of German industries how further to apply it (R. 371). Of
their work a recent _Report_ [9] well says:
While in other countries the development of science has been academic,
in Germany every new principle elaborated by science has
revolutionized some industry, modified some manufacturing process, or
opened up an entirely new field of commercial exploitation. In the
chemical industries of Germany ... there is one trained university
chemist for every forty working-people. It is important to realize
that the development of Germany's manufactures and commerce has
depended not upon the establishment of any monopoly in the domain of
science, not upon any special advancement of science within her own
boundaries, but primarily upon the practical utilization of the
results of scientific research in Germany and other countries.
The creation of the United States Military Academy, at West Point, in
1802, marks the American beginnings in technical education. In 1824 the
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was begun, largely as a manual-labor
school after the Fellenberg plan, to give instruction "in the applications
of science to the common purposes of life," and about 1850 this developed
into one of the earliest of our four-year engineering colleges. In 1846
the United States organized a college for naval engineering, at Annapolis,
to do for the Navy what West Point had done for the Army. In 1861 the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded, opening its doors in
1865. This was the first of a number of important new engineering
colleges, and eight others had been established, by private funds, before
1880.
The development in England came a little later. Good engineering schools
have since been developed in connection with the new municipal
universities, while good engineering colleges have also been created at
Oxford and Cambridge, as well as at the Scottish and Irish universities.
THE NEW IMPULSES TO DEVELOPMENT. During the first six decades of the
nineteenth century, France, the German States, and the United States were
slowly moving toward the creation of special schools for technical
education. After about 1860 the movement increased with great rapidity. A
number of events contributed to this change in rate of development, the
most important of which were:
1. The development attained by pure science, by about 1860. (See
chapter XXVII, part II, p. 723.)
2. The Industrial Revolution (p. 728), which changed nations from an
agricultural to an industrial status, opened up the possibilities of
vast world trade, and created enormous demands for technically trained
men to supervise and develop the rapidly growing industries of
nations.
3. The London Exhibition of 1851, which displayed to the world the
applications of science to trade, manufacturing, and the arts, made in
particular by England. This opened the eyes of Europe and America to
the possibilities of technical education, and led to the creation, in
1853, of a national Department of Science and Art (p. 638) for
England. This began the stimulation, by money grants, of technical
education and instruction in drawing, and exerted from the first an
important influence on English education.
4. The passage by the Congress of the United States of the Morrill
Land-Grant-College Act, in 1862, which provided for the creation of
colleges of engineering, military science, and agriculture, in each of
the American States.
5. The militarily successful wars of Prussia against Denmark, in 1864;
Austria, 1866; and France, 1870-71. These revealed to other nations
the importance of sound military and engineering education for a
nation, and so tremendously stimulated German technical education that
the new nation soon arose, in many lines, to a position of world
industrial leadership (369).
6. The Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, in 1876, which repeated
the work of the London Exhibition of 1851, and gave a new meaning to
the scientific and engineering education then developing in the new
American Land-Grant Colleges.
7. The work of Virchow in Germany (1856) in developing pathology; of
Pasteur in France, after 1859, in establishing the germ theory of
disease; the English surgeon Lister, about the same time, in
developing antiseptic surgery; and the new work of physiologists and
chemists. Combined these have remade medical science, and have opened
up immense possibilities for benefiting mankind.
Following these important stimuli to activity, the important nations of
the world began the earnest development of technical education, and later
medical education, with the result that this new development has affected
educational practice all over the world. The new ideas have spread to all
continents, and to-day the call for technical education comes not only
from the older nations and such new countries as Canada, Australia, South
Africa, and the South American States, but from such ancient and backward
civilizations as Japan, China, Siam, the Philippines, the East Indies,
Egypt, Persia, and Turkey.
In consequence to-day numerous and expensive engineering colleges and
research institutions are maintained by the important world nations. To-
day the trained engineer goes to work his wonders in all corners of the
globe, and his task has become primarily that of organizing and directing
men in the work of controlling the forces and materials of nature so that
they may be made to benefit the human race. So rapid has been the
development that, out of the earlier comprehensive type of engineering,
to-day dozens of specialized types of engineering education and
specialization have been evolved, covering such related fields as civil,
mechanical, mining, metallurgical, electrical, architectural, chemical,
electro-chemical, marine, naval, sanitary, biological, and public-health
engineering. No longer can a nation hope to develop its resources, care
properly for the modern needs of its people, or be counted among the
important industrial or agricultural nations if it neglects the
development of technical education.
SCIENCE APPLIED TO AGRICULTURE. France also was the direct inheritor,
through the monks, of the old Roman agricultural knowledge and skills,
though up to the nineteenth century no attempt to organize agricultural
instruction took place anywhere in Europe. The earliest effort in that
direction was a proposal made in 1775 by Abbe Rosier, in France, to
Turgot, then Minister of Finance, on "A Plan for a National School of
Agriculture." Nothing coming of the proposal, the Abbe submitted the
proposal to the National Assembly, in 1789, and the same idea was later
presented to Napoleon, but without results. The first person to give
practical form to the idea was Fellenberg (p. 546), who conducted his
manual-labor agricultural institute at Hofwyl, from 1806 to 1844, and
inaugurated a plan of educational procedure which was soon afterwards
copied in Switzerland, France, the South German States, England, and the
United States. One of the earliest institutions to be established outside
of Switzerland was the Institute of Agriculture and Forestry, founded by
the Agricultural Society of Wuertemberg, in 1817, at Hohenheim, near
Stuttgart.
The earliest schools to teach agriculture in France were the Royal
Agronomic Institution at Grignon (1827); the Institute at Coetbo (1830),
and the Agricultural School at San Juan (1833). By 1847 twenty-five
agricultural schools were in operation in France, to several of which
orphan asylums and penal colonies were attached. In 1848 the French
Government reorganized the instruction in agriculture and gave it a
national basis. It ordered the creation of a farm school in each
department of France; a number of higher schools for agricultural
instruction at central places; and a National Agronomic Institute for more
advanced instruction. A treasury grant of 2,500,000 francs to establish
the system was voted. In 1873 elementary instruction in agriculture was
ordered given in all village and rural elementary schools.
In the United States a number of agricultural societies were formed early
in the century, and a private school of agriculture was opened in Maine,
in 1821, and another in Connecticut, in 1824. With the opening-up of the
new West to farming and the change of the East to manufacturing, after
about 1825, the agitation for agricultural education for a time died out,
reappearing in Michigan, in 1850. In that year a new constitution was
adopted which required the legislature to create a State School of
Agriculture, and in 1857 the Michigan Agricultural College opened its
doors. Two years later a "Farmers' High School," which later became the
Pennsylvania State College, was opened in central Pennsylvania. In 1862,
in the midst of the greatest civil war in history, the American Congress
passed the very important Morrill Act, which provided for the creation of
a college to teach agriculture, mechanic arts, and military science in
each of the American States. It was a decade before many of these
institutions opened, and for a time they amounted to but little. They had
but few students, little money, and the instruction was very elementary
and but poorly organized. Cornell University, in New York State, was one
of the first (1868) of the new institutions to get under way and find its
work. The Centennial Exposition (1876) gave the needed emphasis to the
engineering courses, and by 1880 these were well established. The
agricultural courses did not flourish for two decades longer, and the
military science not until the World War, Despite feeble beginnings, the
result of the aid given by the national government has in time proved very
valuable, and to-day very large sums of money are being appropriated by
the American States and Territories for instruction in engineering,
agriculture, home economics, and related sciences, and large numbers of
students are now enrolled for this technical training.
THE RECENT NEW INTEREST IN AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. Since the latter part
of the nineteenth century agricultural education has awakened new interest
in many lands. The German States have created many schools for instruction
in agriculture and forestry. Denmark has regenerated the rural life of the
nation (R. 370) by its "People's High Schools" and its special schools for
instruction in agriculture. Italy has recently made special efforts to
extend agricultural instruction to its people. Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand have established agricultural schools. In Algiers, Morocco, Japan,
China, the Philippines, and India, good beginnings in agricultural
education have been made.
As agricultural knowledge has been worked out and classified, and
agricultural instruction has become organized, it has become possible to
relegate some of the more elementary instruction to the school below. This
was done in European nations before it took place in the United States. In
1888 the first American agricultural high school was established in
Minnesota. By 1898 there were ten such schools in the United States, but
since 1900 the development has been very rapid. By 1920 probably a
thousand high schools were offering instruction in agriculture, while
elementary instruction in agriculture had been introduced into the rural
and village schools of practically every American agricultural State.
The agricultural schools, colleges, and experimental stations established
by the national, state, and local educational authorities of different
nations have added another new division to the work of public education,
and one which is both very costly and very remunerative. Out of the work
of these schools has come a vast quantity of useful knowledge, and
hundreds of important applications of science to farm and home life. Old
breeds in stock and grains have been improved, new breeds have been
derived, and productivity has been greatly increased. Through the
teachings of home economics the farmer's home is being transformed, while
the applications of science made in these schools are modifying almost
every phase of agricultural life and rural living.
MEDICINE AND SANITARY SCIENCE. Closely related to sanitary, biological,
and public-health engineering has been the enormous recent development of
medicine and surgery. Within half a century instruction in these subjects
has been entirely transformed, and large and costly laboratories and
hospitals are now required for the work. There has also been much
specialization in medical training, within recent years, and especially
has preventive medicine been developed. Extending the newly found
biological and medical knowledge to the animal and vegetable worlds has
resulted in a similar development of veterinary medicine [10] and plant
pathology. A combination of medical knowledge with engineering and
chemistry has produced the sanitary engineer, while medical knowledge and
applied biology has produced the public-health expert. [11]
So important, too, has the control of all kinds of disease become, now
that people, animals, insects, plants, and goods move so freely along the
great trade routes of the world, that nations everywhere feel the
necessity, now that scientific research has revealed to questioning man
the methods of transmission of the diseases which once decimated armies
and cities, destroyed stocks, and ruined harvests, of developing ample
quarantine service and medical staffs to cope with diseases--human,
animal, and plant--from without, and to control those which arise within.
Nations too poor as yet to provide such service for themselves are today
having such provision made for them by other nations, or by great national
foundations, [12] so that other lands may be protected from the ravages of
their diseases and the economic wealth of all may be increased. The
element of Christian charity has also entered into the service, the labors
of Dr. Grenfell in Labrador, and the work of the Rockefeller medical and
surgical boat traveling among the Philippine Islands and its hookworm work
on every continent, being good examples of such Christian effort.
[Illustration: FIG. 232. THE PEKING UNION MEDICAL COLLEGE
A well-equipped center for instruction in western medicine, endowed by the
Rockefeller Foundation. A similar school is being created at Shanghai, in
central China. Existing medical schools at two other points, and nineteen
hospitals scattered over the Republic, have also been aided by this
American foundation. In addition, many medical missionaries, Chinese
physicians, and nurses have been sent to the United States for study. To
improve health standards and living conditions throughout the world is the
purpose of the work of the Foundation, which now has work under way on
every continent.]
APPLIED SCIENCE THE NATION'S PROTECTOR. To-day applied science stands
everywhere as the nation's protector. Applied in sanitation and preventive
medicine it has reduced the death rate, prolonged life, and protects homes
from many hidden dangers. In the engineering fields it has transformed the
face of the earth and all our ways of living and doing business. Applied
to industry it builds factories and railways, and works out new processes
to eliminate wastes, improve production, and utilize by-products.
Thousands of labor-saving inventions owe their origin to a new truth
worked out in some laboratory, and applied in another. Applied chemistry
has wrought wonders in advancing industry, protecting the public welfare,
eliminating unnecessary labor, and making life richer for all.
To-day the engineer with his railway and irrigating dam and power plant in
the desert has replaced the monk as the vanguard of the forces of
civilization. The scientist in his laboratory in part replaces armies and
navies as the protector of the nation's safety. The scientifically trained
Red Cross nurse is fast replacing the unskilled devotion of the older
Sister of Charity. The doctor and the surgeon at the medical mission are
carrying a very practical type of Christian civilization into far-away
lands. The laboratory expert in the quarantine station has succeeded the
priest with bell and book in keeping pestilence away from the land. The
public-health officer in the little town, and the sanitary engineer in the
city, protect the health and happiness of millions of homes. The plant
pathologist and veterinarian guard the crops and herds from which food and
clothing are derived. The scientific experts in plant and animal
industries work steadily to improve breeds and increase yields. When one
compares present-day scientific knowledge with that represented in the
thirteenth-century Encyclopaedia of Bartholomew Anglicus (R. 77); our
modern knowledge of diseases with the theories as to disease advanced by
Hippocrates (p. 197), and taught for so many centuries in Christian
Europe; our modern knowledge of bacterial transmission with the mediaeval
theories of Divine wrath and diabolic action; our modern ability to
annihilate time and space compared with early nineteenth-century
conditions; or modern applied science with the very limited technical
knowledge possessed by the guilds of the later Middle Ages--the stories of
Aladdin and his wonderful lamp seem to have been even more than realized
in our practical everyday life.
Engineering, agriculture, and modern medicine stand as three of the great
applications of modern science to human affairs, and as three of the most
important and costly additions to state educational effort made since the
time when nations began to accept the political philosophy of the
eighteenth-century reformers and to take over the school from the Church,
because by so doing the interests of the State could better be advanced
thereby.
III. VOCATIONAL
WHAT IS VOCATIONAL EDUCATION? In a certain sense, all education is
vocational, in that it aims to prepare one for some vocation in life. In
Greece and Rome education was vocational, in that it prepared one to be a
citizen in the State. During the Middle Ages education was to prepare for
a vocation in the Church. Later the vocation of a scholar appeared, and
still later that of a gentleman. In modern times a large range of state
services have been opened up as vocations. Since the beginning of the
nineteenth century, with the extension of educational advantages to
increasing numbers of the people, preparation for more intelligent living
and citizenship have come to be new motives in education. To-day we no
longer use the term vocational education in this rather general sense, but
restrict its use to the specific training of individuals for some useful
employment. Training for law, medicine, the ministry, teaching,
engineering, scientific agriculture, nursing, and commerce are examples of
vocational education in its higher ranges. The development of education
along these lines has previously been described. In this division of this
chapter we shall use the term in a still more common and still more
restricted sense, as meaning the training of the younger people of a State
to do well certain specific things, by teaching them processes and the
practical applications of knowledge, chiefly science and art, to the work
of the vocation they expect to follow to earn their living. The Report of
the American Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education (1914)
defined vocational education (p. 16) as follows:
Wherever the term "vocational education" is used in this
_Report_, it will mean, unless otherwise explained, that form of
education whose controlling purpose is to give training of a secondary
grade to persons over fourteen years of age, for increased efficiency
in useful employment in the trades and industries, in agriculture, in
commerce and commercial pursuits, and in callings based upon a
knowledge of home economics. The occupations included under these are
almost endless in number and variety.
THE NEED FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Used in this sense vocational education
is an application of technical knowledge, worked out in the higher
schools, to the ordinary vocations of a modern industrial world. As such
it is a product of the Industrial Revolution and the breakdown of the age-
old system of apprenticeship training, [13] and represents another of the
important recent extensions of educational advantages to the masses of the
people who labor with their hands to earn their daily bread.
Besides further democratizing education by extending its advantages to
those who work in the shop and the office and on the farm, vocational
education tends to correct many of the evils of modern industrial life. It
puts the worker in possession of a great body of scientific knowledge
relating to his work which shops and offices cannot give, and it keeps
him, for several years after he becomes a wage earner and at a very
impressionable period of his life, under the directing care of the school.
It thus tends "to counteract the specialization and routine of the
workshop, which wears out his body before nature has completed its
development in form and power, blunts the intelligence which the school
had tried to awaken, shrivels up his heart and imagination, and destroys
his spirit of work."
VOCATIONAL EDUCATION IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES. For almost half a
century the leading nations of western Europe, in an effort to readjust
their age-old apprenticeship system of training to modern conditions of
manufacture, and to develop new national prestige and strength, have given
careful attention to the education of such of their children as were
destined for the vocations of the industrial world. Germany, Austria,
Switzerland, and France have been leaders, with Germany most prominent of
all. [14] No small part of the great progress made by that country in
securing world-wide trade, [15] before the World War, was due to the
extensive and thorough system of vocational education worked out for
German youths (R. 371). In commercial education, too, the Germans, up to
1914, led the world. Even more, they were the only great national group
which had done much to develop commercial training. Next to Germany
probably came the United States. The marked economic progress of
Switzerland during the past quarter-century has likewise been due in large
part to that type of education which would enable her, by skillful
artisanship, to make the most of her very limited resources France has
profited greatly, during the past half-century also, from vocational
education along the lines of agriculture and industrial art. In Denmark,
agricultural education has remade the nation (R. 370), since the days of
its humiliation and spoliation at the hands of Prussia. England, though
keenly sensitive to German trade competition, made only very moderate
efforts in the direction of vocational education until Germany plunged the
world in war in an effort more quickly to dominate commercially. Now, in
the Fisher Education Act of 1918 (p. 649), England has $t last laid
foundations for a great national system of vocational education. Japan,
also, recently laid large plans for a national system of vocational
training.
[Illustration: FIG. 233. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TRADES IN MODERN INDUSTRY
Under the old conditions of apprenticeship a boy learned all the processes
and became a tailor. To-day, in a thoroughly organized clothing factory,
thirty-nine different persons perform different specialized operations in
the manufacture of a coat.]
In the United States but little attention was given to educating young
people for the vocations of life until about 1905-10, though modern
manufacturing conditions had before this largely destroyed the old
apprenticeship type of training. Endowed with enormous natural resources;
not being pressed for the means of subsistence by a rapidly expanding
population on a limited land area; able to draw on Europe for both cheap
manual labor and technically educated workers; largely isolated and self-
sufficient as a nation; lacking a merchant marine; not being thrown into
severe competition for international trade; and able to sell its products
[16] to nations anxious to buy them and willing to come for them in their
own ships; the people of the United States did not, up to recently, feel
any particular need for anything other than a good common-school education
or a general high-school education for their workers. The commercial
course in the high school, the manual-training schools and courses, and
some instruction in drawing and creative art were felt to be about all
that it was necessary to provide.
THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Largely since 1910, due
in part to expanding world commerce and increasing competition in world
trade; in part to a national realization that the battles of the future
are to be largely commercial battles; and in part to the dawning upon the
American people of the conception, first thought out and put into practice
by Imperial Germany (R. 371), that that nation will triumph in foreign
trade, with all that such triumph means to-day in terms of the happiness
and welfare of its citizenship (R. 372), which puts the greatest amount of
skill and brains into what it produces and sells.
After a number of sporadic efforts in different parts of the country, [17]
and the introduction of a number of bills into Congress which failed to
secure passage, the favorite English plan was followed and a Presidential
Commission was appointed (1913) to inquire into the matter, and to report
on the desirability and feasibility of some form of national aid to
stimulate the development of vocational education. The Commission made its
report in 1914, and submitted a plan for gradually increasing national aid
to the States to assist them in developing and maintaining what will
virtually become a national system of agricultural, trade, commercial, and
home-economics education.
THE COMMISSION'S FINDINGS. The Commission found that there were, in 1910,
in round numbers, 12,500,000 persons engaged in agriculture in the United
States, of whom not over one per cent had had any adequate preparation for
farming; and that there were 14,250,000 persons engaged in manufacturing
and mechanical pursuits, not one per cent of whom had had any opportunity
for adequate training. [18] In the whole United States there were fewer
trade schools, of all kinds, than existed in the little German kingdom of
Bavaria, a State about the size of South Carolina; while the one Bavarian
city of Munich, a city about the size of Pittsburgh, had more trade
schools than were to be found in all the larger cities of the United
States, put together. The Commission further found that there were
25,000,000 persons in the nation, eighteen years of age or over, engaged
in farming, mining, manufacturing, and mechanical pursuits, and in trade
and transportation, and of these the _Report_ said:
If we assume that a system of vocational education, pursued through
the years of the past, would have increased the wage-earning capacity
of each of these persons to the extent of only ten cents a day, this
would have made an increase of wages for the group of $2,500,000 a
day, or $750,000,000 a year, with all that this would mean to the
wealth and life of the nation.
This is a very moderate estimate, and the facts would probably show a
difference between the earning power of the vocationally trained and
the vocationally untrained of at least twenty-five cents a day. This
would indicate a waste of wages, through lack of training, amounting
to $6,250,000 every day, or $1,875,000,000 for the year.
[Illustration: FIG. 234. SCHOOL ATTENDANCE OF AMERICAN CHILDREN, FOURTEEN
TO TWENTY YEARS or AGE
Based on an estimate made by the United States Bureau of Education in 1907
(Bulletin No. 1, p. 29), and based on conditions then existing, but
probably still approximately true. In evening schools all classes were
counted--public, private, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., etc. Public and private day
schools, both elementary and secondary, also were counted.]
The Commission estimated that a million new young people were required
annually by our industries, and that it would need three years of
vocational education, beyond the elementary-school age, to prepare them
for efficient service. This would require that three million young people
of elementary-school age be continually enrolled in schools offering some
form of vocational training. This was approximately three times the number
of young people then enrolled in all public and private high schools in
the United States, and following any kind of a course of study. In
addition, the untrained adult workers then in farming and industry also
needed some form of adult or extension education to enable them to do more
effective work. The Commission further pointed out that there were in the
United States, in 1910, 7,220,298 young people between the ages of
fourteen and eighteen years, only 1,032,461 of whom were enrolled in a
high school of any type, public or private, day or evening (Fig. 234), and
few of those enrolled were pursuing studies of a technical type.
AMERICAN BEGINNINGS; MEANING OF THE WORK. In 1917 the American Congress
made the beginnings of what is destined to develop rapidly into a truly
national system of vocational education for the boys and girls of
secondary-school age in the United States. This new addition to the
systems of public instruction now provided is one which in time will bring
returns out of all proportion to its costs. Without it the national
prosperity and happiness would be at stake, and the position the United
States has attained in the markets of the world could not possibly be
maintained (R. 372).
This new American legislation is based on the best continental European
experience, and is somewhat typical of recent national legislation for
similar objects elsewhere. It is to include vocational training for
agriculture, the trades and industries, commerce, and home economics. [19]
A certain portion of the money appropriated annually by the national
government is to be used for making or cooeperating in studies and
investigations as to needs and courses in agriculture, home economics,
trades, industries, and commerce. The courses must be given in the public
schools; must be for those over fourteen years of age and of less than
college grade; and must be primarily intended for those who are preparing
to enter or who have entered (part-time classes) a trade or a useful
industrial pursuit.
As nation after nation becomes industrialized, as all except the smallest
and poorest nations are bound to become in time, vocational education for
its workers in the field, shop, and office will be found to be another
state necessity. Only the State can adequately provide this, for only the
State can finance or properly organize and integrate the work of so large
and so important an undertaking. Though costly, this new extension of
state educational effort will be found to be a wise business investment
for every industrial and commercial nation. Considered nationally, the
workers of any nation not provided with vocational education will find
themselves unable to compete with the workers of other nations which do
provide such specialized training.
IV. SOCIOLOGICAL
A NEW ESTIMATE AS TO THE VALUE OF CHILD LIFE. As we saw in chapter XVIII,
which described the opportunities for and the kind of schooling developed
up to the middle of the eighteenth century, but little of what may be
called formal education had been provided up to then for the great mass of
children, even in the most progressive nations. We also noted the extreme
brutality of the school. Such was the history of childhood, so far as it
may be said to have had a history at all, up to the rise of the great
humanitarian movement early in the nineteenth century. [20] Neglect,
abuse, mutilation, excessive labor, heavy punishments, and often virtual
slavery awaited children everywhere up to recent times. The sufferings of
childhood at home were added to by others in the school (p. 455) for such
as frequented these institutions.
After the coming of mills and manufacturing the lot of children became,
for a time, worse than before. The demand for cheap labor led to the
apprenticing of children to the factories to tend machines, instead of to
a master to learn a trade, and there they became virtual slaves and their
treatment was most inhuman. [21] Conditions were worse in England than
elsewhere, not because the English were more brutal than the French or the
Germans, but because the Industrial Revolution began earlier in England
and before the rise of humanitarian influences. England was a
manufacturing nation decades before France, and longer still before
Germany. By the time Germany had changed from an agricultural to a
manufacturing nation (after 1871), the new humanitarianism and new
economic conditions had placed a new value on child life and child
welfare.
Since about 1850 an entirely new estimate has come to be placed on the
importance of national attention to child welfare, though the beginnings
of the change date back much earlier. As we have seen (p. 325), England
early began to care for the children of its poor. In the Poor-Relief and
Apprenticeship Law of 1601 (R. 174) England organized into law the growing
practice of a century (p. 326) and laid the basis for much future work of
importance. In this legislation, as we have seen, the foundations of the
Massachusetts school law of 1642 were laid. In the Virginia laws of 1643
and 1646 (R. 200 a) and the Massachusetts law of 1660, providing for the
apprenticeship of orphans and homeless children, the beginnings of child-
welfare work in the American Colonies were made.
Many of the Catholic religious orders in Europe had for long cared for and
brought up poor and neglected children, and in 1729 the first private
orphanage in the new world was established by the Ursulines (p. 346) in
New Orleans. The first public orphanage in America was established in
Charleston, South Carolina, in 1790; the first in England at Birmingham,
in 1817, and in 1824 the New York House of Refuge was founded. The latter
was the forerunner of the juvenile reformatory institutions established
later by practically all of the American States. These have developed
chiefly since 1850. To-day most of the American States and governments in
many other lands also provide state homes for orphan and neglected
children, where they are clothed, fed, cared for, educated, and trained
for some useful employment.
CHILD-LABOR LEGISLATION. One of the best evidences of the new nineteenth-
century humanitarianism is to be found in the large amount of child-labor
legislation which arose, largely after 1850, and which has been
particularly prominent since 1900.
Under the earlier agricultural conditions and the restricted demand for
education for ordinary life needs, child labor was not especially harmful,
as most of it was out of doors and under reasonably good health
conditions. With the coming of the factory system, the rise of cities and
the city congestion of population, and other evils connected with the
Industrial Revolution, the whole situation was changed. Humanitarians now
began to demand legislation to restrict the evils that had arisen. This
demand arose earliest in England, and resulted in the earliest legislation
there.
The year 1802 is important in the history of child-welfare work for the
enactment, by the English Parliament, of the first law to regulate the
employment of children in factories. This was known as the Health and
Morals of Apprentices Act (R. 373). This Act, though largely ineffectual
at the time, ordered important reforms which aroused public opinion and
which later bore important fruit. By it the employment of work-house
orphans was limited; it forbade the labor of children under twelve, for
more than twelve hours a day; provided that night labor of children should
be discontinued, after 1804; ordered that the children so employed must be
taught reading and writing and ciphering, be instructed in religion one
hour a week, be taken to church every Sunday, and be given one new suit of
clothes a year; ordered separate sleeping apartments for the two sexes,
and not over two children to a bed; and provided for the registration and
inspection of factories. This law represents the beginnings of modern
child-labor legislation. It was 1843 before any further child-labor
legislation of importance was enacted, and 1878 before a comprehensive
child-labor bill was finally passed. In the United States the first laws
regulating the employment of children and providing for their school
attendance were enacted by Rhode Island in 1840, and Massachusetts in
1842. Factory legislation in other countries has been a product of more
recent forces and times.
To-day important child-labor legislation has been enacted by all
progressive nations, and the leading world nations have taken advanced
ground on the question. All recent thinking is opposed to children
engaging in productive labor. With the rise of organized labor, and the
extension of the suffrage to the laboring man, he has joined the
humanitarians in opposition to his children being permitted to labor. From
an economic point of view also, all recent studies have shown the
unprofitableness of child labor and the large money-value, under present
industrial conditions, of a good education. As a result of much agitation
and the spread of popular education, it has at last come to be a generally
accepted principle (R. 374) that it is better for children and better for
society that they should remain in school until they are at least fourteen
years of age, and be specially trained for some useful type of work. Shown
to be economically unprofitable, and for long morally indefensible, child
labor is now rapidly being superseded by suitable education and the
vocational training and guidance of youth in all progressive nations.
COMPULSORY SCHOOL-ATTENDANCE LEGISLATION. The natural corollary of the
taxation of the wealth of the State to educate the children of the State,
and the prohibition of children to labor, is the compulsion of children to
attend school that they may receive the instruction and training which the
State has deemed it wise to tax its citizens to provide.
Except in the German States, compulsory education is a relatively recent
idea, though in its origins it is a child of the Protestant Reformation
theory as to education for salvation. Luther and his followers had stood
for the education of all, supported by (R. 156) and enforced by (R. 158)
the State. This idea of the education of all to read the Bible took deep
root, as we have seen, with both Lutherans and Calvinists. In 1619 the
little Duchy of Weimar made the school attendance of all children, six to
twelve years of age, compulsory, and the same idea was instituted in Gotha
by Duke Ernest (p. 317), in 1642; the same year that the Massachusetts
General Court ordered the Selectmen of the towns to ascertain if parents
and the masters of apprentices (R. 190) were training their children "in
learning and labor" and "to read and understand the principles of religion
and the capital laws of the country." This latter law is remarkable in
that, for the first time in the English-speaking world, a legislative body
representing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read.
Five years later (1647) the Massachusetts Court ordered the establishment
of schools (R. 191) better to enforce the compulsion, and thus laid the
foundations upon which the American public-school systems have since been
built. In Holland, the Synod of Dort (1618) had tried to institute the
idea of compulsory education (R. 176), and in 1646 the Scotch Parliament
had ordered the compulsory establishment of schools (R. 179).
In German lands the compulsory-attendance idea took deep root, and in
consequence the Germans were the first important modern nation to enforce,
thoroughly, the education of all. In 1717 King Frederick William I issued
(p. 555) the first compulsory-education law for Prussia, ordering that
"hereafter wherever there are schools in the place the parents shall be
obliged, under severe penalties, to send their children to school,...
daily in winter, but in summer at least twice a week." He further ordered
that the fees for the poor were to be paid "from the community's funds."
Finally Frederick the Great organized the earlier procedure into
comprehensive codes, and made (1763, R. 274, Section 10; 1765, R. 275 d)
detailed provisions relating to the compulsion to attend the schools. In
the Code of 1794 (p. 565) the final legislative step was taken when it was
ordered that "the instruction in school must be continued until the child
is found to possess the knowledge necessary to every rational being." By
the middle of the eighteenth century the basis was clearly laid in Prussia
for that enforcement of the compulsion to attend schools which, by the
middle of the nineteenth century, had become such a notable characteristic
of all German education. The same compulsory idea early took deep root
among the Scandinavian peoples. In consequence the lowest illiteracy in
Europe, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was to be found (see
map, p. 714) among the Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Germans.
The compulsory-attendance idea died out in America, in the Netherlands,
and in part in Scotland. In England and in the Anglican Colonies in
America it never took root. In France the idea awaited the work of the
National Convention, which (1792) ordered three years of education
compulsory for all. War and the lack of interest of Napoleon in primary
education caused the requirement, however, to become a dead letter. The
Law of 1833 provided for but did not enforce it, and real compulsory
education in France did not come until 1882. In England the compulsory
idea received but little attention until after 1870, met with much
opposition, and only recently have comprehensive reforms been provided. In
the United States the new beginnings of compulsory-attendance legislation
date from the Rhode Island child-labor law of 1840, and the first modern
compulsory-attendance law enacted by Massachusetts, in 1852. By 1885,
fourteen American States and six Territories had enacted some form of
compulsory-attendance law. Since 1900 there has been a general revision of
American state legislation on the subject, with a view to increasing and
the better enforcement of the compulsory-attendance requirements, and with
a general demand that the National Congress should enact a national child-
labor law.
As a result of this legislation the labor of young children has been
greatly restricted; work in many industries has been prohibited entirely,
because of the danger to life and health; compulsory education has been
extended in a majority of the American States to cover the full school
year; poverty, or dependent parents, in many States no longer serves as an
excuse for non-attendance; often those having physical or mental defects
also are included in the compulsion to attend, if their wants can be
provided for; the school census has been changed so as to aid in the
location of children of compulsory school-attendance age; and special
officers have been authorized or ordered appointed to assist school
authorities in enforcing the compulsory-attendance and child-labor laws.
Having taxed their citizens to provide schools, the different States now
require children to attend and partake of the advantages provided. The
schools, too, have made a close study of retarded pupils, because of the
close connection found to exist between retardation in school and truancy
and juvenile delinquency.
ONE RESULT OF THIS LEGISLATION. One of the results of all this legislation
has been to throw, during the past quarter of a century, an entirely new
burden on schools everywhere. Such legislation has brought into the
schools not only the truant and the incorrigible, who under former
conditions either left early or were expelled, but also many children who
have no aptitude for book learning, and many of inferior mental qualities
who do not profit by ordinary classroom procedure. Still more, they have
brought into the school the crippled, tubercular, deaf, epileptic, and
blind, as well as the sick, needy, and physically unfit. By steadily
raising the age at which children may leave school, from ten or twelve up
to fourteen and sixteen, schools everywhere have come to contain many
children who, having no natural aptitude for study, would at once, unless
specially handled, become a nuisance in the school and tend to demoralize
schoolroom procedure. These laws have thrown upon the school a new burden
in the form of public expectancy for results, whereas a compulsory-
education law cannot create capacity to profit from education. Under the
earlier educational conditions the school, unable to handle or educate
such children, dealt with them much as the Church of the time dealt with
religious delinquents. It simply expelled them or let them drop from
school, and no longer concerned itself about them. To-day the public
expects the school to retain and get results with them. Consequently,
within the past twenty-five years the whole attitude of the school toward
such children has undergone a change; many different kinds of classes and
courses, that might serve better to handle them, have been introduced; and
an attempt has been made to salvage them and turn back to society as many
of them as possible, trained for some form of social and personal
usefulness.
THE EDUCATION OF DEFECTIVES. Another nineteenth-century expansion of state
education has come in the provision now generally made for the education
of defectives. To-day the state school systems of Christian nations
generally make some provision for state institutional care, and often for
local classes as well, for the training of children who belong to the
seriously defective classes of society. This work is almost entirely a
product of the new humanitarianism of modern times. Excepting the
education of the deaf, seriously begun a little earlier, all effective
work dates from the first half of the nineteenth century. At first the
feasibility of all such instruction was doubted, and the work generally
was commenced privately. Out of successes thus achieved, public
institutions have been built up to carry on, on a large scale, what was
begun privately on a small scale. It is now felt to be better for the
State, as well as for the unfortunates themselves, that they be cared for
and educated, as suitably and well as possible, for self-respect, self-
support, and some form of social and vocational usefulness. In
consequence, the compulsory-attendance laws of the leading world States
to-day require that defectives, between certain ages at least, be sent to
a state institution or be enrolled in a public-school class specialized
for their training.
[Illustration: FIG. 235. ABBE DE L'EPEE (1712-89)]
BEGINNINGS OF THE WORK. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century a
number of private efforts at the education of the deaf are on record, all
dating however from the pioneer work of a Spanish Benedictine, in 1578. In
1760 a new era in the education of the deaf was begun when Abbe de l'Epee
opened a school at Paris for the oral instruction of poor deaf mutes, and
Thomas Braidwood (1715-1806) began similar work at Edinburgh. A few years
later (1778) a third school was opened at Leipzig. This last was
established under the patronage of the Elector of Saxony, and was the
first school of its kind in the world to receive government recognition.
The Paris school was taken over as a state institution by the Constituent
Assembly, in 1791. In England the instruction of the deaf remained a
private and a family monopoly until 1819. In 1817 the first school in
America was opened, at Hartford, Connecticut, by the Reverend Thomas H.
Gallaudet, and Massachusetts, in 1819, sent the first pupils paid for at
state expense to this institution. In 1823 Kentucky created the first
state school for the training of the deaf established in the new world,
and Ohio the second, in 1827.
[Illustration: FIG. 236. REV. THOMAS H. GALLAUDET TEACHING THE DEAF AND
DUMB
From a bas-relief on the monument of Gallaudet, erected by the deaf and
dumb of the United States, in the grounds of the American Asylum, at
Hartford, Connecticut.]
The education of the blind began in France, in 1784; England, in 1791;
Austria, in 1804; Prussia, in 1806; Holland, in 1808; Sweden, in 1810;
Denmark, in 1811; Scotland, in 1812; in Boston and New York, in 1832; and
in Philadelphia, in 1833. All were private institutions, and general
interest in the education of the blind was awakened later by exhibiting
the pupils trained. The first book for the blind was printed in Paris, in
1786. The first kindergarten for the blind was established in Germany, in
1861; the first school for the colored blind, by North Carolina, in 1869.
[Illustration: FIG. 237. EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS MAINTAINED BY THE STATE
As state institutions, other than public schools.]
Before the nineteenth century the feeble-minded and idiotic were the
laughing-stock of society, and no one thought of being able to do anything
for them. In 1811 Napoleon ordered a census of such individuals, and in
1816 the first school for their training was opened at Salzburg, Austria.
The school was unsuccessful, and closed in 1835. The real beginning of the
training of the feeble-minded was made in France, by Edouard Seguin, "The
Apostle of the Idiot," in 1837, when he began a life-long study of such
defectives. By 1845 three or four institutions had been opened in
Switzerland and Great Britain for their study and training, and for a time
an attempt was made to effect cures. Gallaudet had tried to educate such
children at Hartford, about 1820, and a class for idiots was established
at the Blind Asylum in Boston, in 1848. The interest thus aroused led to
the creation of the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded
Youth, in 1851, the first institution of its kind in the United States. In
1867 the first city school class to train children of low-grade
intelligence was organized in Germany, and all the larger cities of
Germany later organized such special classes. Norway followed with a
similar city organization, in 1874; and England, Switzerland, and Austria,
about 1892. The first American city to organize such classes was
Providence, Rhode Island, in 1893. Since that time special classes for
children of low-grade mentality have become a common feature of the large
city school systems in most American cities.
In 1832 the first attempt to educate crippled children, as such, was made
in Munich. The model school in Europe for the education of cripples was
established in Copenhagen, in 1872. The work was begun privately in New
York City, in 1861, and first publicly in Chicago, in 1899. The London
School Board first began such classes in England, in 1898.
Dependents, orphans, children of soldiers and sailors, and incorrigibles
of various classes represent others for whom modern States have now
provided special state institutions. To-day a modern State finds it
necessary to provide a number of such specialized institutions, or to make
arrangements with neighboring States for the care of its dependents, if it
is to meet what have come to be recognized as its humanitarian educational
duties. The more important of these special state institutions are shown
in the diagram given in Fig. 237.
Public playgrounds and play directors, vacation schools, juvenile courts,
disciplinary classes, parental schools, classes for mothers, visiting
home-teachers and nurses, and child-welfare societies and officers, are
other means for caring for child life and child welfare which have all
been begun within the past half-century. The significance of these
additions lies chiefly in that the history of the attitude of nations
toward their child life is the history of the rise of humanitarianism,
altruism, justice, order, morality, and civilization itself.
THE EDUCATION OF SUPERIOR CHILDREN. All the work described above and
relating to the work of defectives, delinquents, and children for some
reason in need of special attention and care has been for those who
represent the less capable and on the whole less useful members of
society--the ones from whom society may expect the least. They are at the
same time the most costly wards of the State.
Wholly within the second decade of the present century, and largely as a
result of the work of the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) we
are now able to sort out, for special attention, a new class of what are
known as superior, or gifted children, and to the education of these
special attention is to-day here and there beginning to be directed.
Educationally, it is an attempt to do for democratic forms of national
organization what a two-class school system does for monarchical forms,
but to select intellectual capacity from the whole mass of the people,
rather than from a selected class or caste. We know now that the number of
children of superior ability is approximately as large as the number of
the feeble in mind, and also that the future of democratic governments
hinges largely upon the proper education and utilization of these superior
children. One child of superior intellectual capacity, educated so as to
utilize his talents, may confer greater benefits upon mankind, and be
educationally far more important, than a thousand of the feeble-minded
children upon whom we have recently come to put so much educational effort
and expense. Questions relating to the training of leaders for democracy's
service attain new significance in terms of the recent ability to measure
and grade intelligence, as also do questions relating to grading,
classification in school, choice of studies, rate of advancement, and the
vocational guidance of children in school.
_Net Average Worth of a Person_
_Age_ _Worth_
0 $90
5 950
10 2000
20 4000
30 4100
40 3650
50 2900
60 1650
70 15
80 -700
(Calculations by Dr. William Farr, formerly Registrar of Vital
Statistics for Great Britain. Based on pre-war values.)
THE NEW INTEREST IN HEALTH. Another new expansion of the educational
service which has come in since the middle of the nineteenth century, and
which has recently grown to be one of large significance, is work in the
medical inspection of schools, the supervision of the health of pupils,
and the new instruction in preventive hygiene. This is a product of the
scientific and social and industrial revolutions which the nineteenth
century brought, rather than of humanitarian influences, and represents an
application of newly discovered scientific knowledge to health work among
children. Its basis is economic, though its results are largely physical
and educational and social (R. 375).
The discovery and isolation of bacteria; the vast amount of new knowledge
which has come to us as to the transmission and possibilities for the
elimination of many diseases; the spread of information as to sanitary
science and preventive medicine; the change in emphasis in medical
practice, from curative to preventive and remedial; the closer crowding
together of all classes of people in cities; the change of habits for many
from life in the open to life in the factory, shop, and apartment; and the
growing realization of the economic value to the nation of its manhood and
womanhood; have all alike combined with modern humanitarianism and applied
Christianity to make progressive nations take a new interest in child
health and proper child development. European nations have so far done
much more in school health work than has the United States, though a very
commendable beginning has been made here.
MEDICAL INSPECTION AND HEALTH SUPERVISION. Medical inspection of schools
began in France, in 1837, though genuine medical inspection, in a modern
sense, was not begun in France until 1879. The pioneer country for real
work was Sweden, where health officers were assigned to each large school
as early as 1868. Norway made such appointments optional in 1885, and
obligatory in 1891. Belgium began the work in 1874. Tests of eyesight were
begun in Dresden in 1867. Frankfort-on-Main appointed the first German
school physician in 1888. England first employed school nurses in 1887;
and, in 1907, following the revelations as to low physical vitality
growing out of the Boer War, adopted a mandatory medical-inspection and
health-development act applying to England and Wales, and the year
following Scotland did the same. Argentine and Chili both instituted such
service in 1888, and Japan made medical inspection compulsory and
universal in 1898.
In the United States the work was begun voluntarily in Boston, in 1894,
following a series of epidemics. Chicago organized medical inspection in
1895, New York City in 1897, and Philadelphia in 1898. From these larger
cities the idea spread to the smaller ones, at first slowly, and then very
rapidly. The first school nurse in the United States was employed in New
York City, in 1902, and the idea at once proved to be of great value. In
1906 Massachusetts adopted the first state medical inspection law. In 1912
Minnesota organized the first "State Division of Health Supervision of
Schools" in the United States, and this plan has since been followed by
other States.
From mere medical inspection to detect contagious diseases, in which the
movement everywhere began, it was next extended to tests for eyesight and
hearing, to be made by teachers or physicians, and has since been enlarged
to include physical examinations to detect hidden diseases and a
constructive health-program for the schools. The work has now come to
include eye, ear, nose, throat, and teeth, as well as general physical
examinations; the supervision of the teaching of hygiene in the schools,
and to a certain extent the physical training and playground activities;
and a constructive program for the development of the health and physical
welfare of all children. All this represents a further extension of the
public-education idea.
V. THE SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION
An important recent development in the field of public education, and in a
sense an outgrowth of all the preceding recent development which we have
described, has been the organization of collegiate and university
instruction in the history, theory, practice, and administration of
education. Still more recent has been the organization of Teachers'
Colleges and Schools of Education to give advanced training in educational
research and in the solution of the practical problems of school
organization and administration. So important has this recent development
become that no history of educational progress would be complete without
at least a brief mention of this recent attempt to give scientific
organization to the educational process.
EARLY BEGINNERS. Though the teachers' seminaries had been organized in
Germany and other northern lands toward the close of the eighteenth
century, the normal school in France early in the nineteenth, and the
training-college in England and the normal school in the United States by
the close of the first third of that century, the work in these remained
for a long time almost entirely academic in nature and elementary in
character. This was also true of the superior normal school for training
teachers for the _lycees_ of France.
The reason for this is easy to find. The writings of the earlier
educational reformers were little known; the contributions of Herbart and
Froebel had not as yet been popularized; there was no organized psychology
of the educational process, and no psychology better than that of John
Locke; the detailed Pestalozzian procedure had not as yet been worked out
in the form of teaching technique; the history of the development of
educational theory or of educational practice had not been written; and
almost no philosophy of the educational purpose had been formulated which
could be used in the training-schools. In consequence the training of
teachers, both for elementary and secondary instruction, [22] was almost
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