What the Schools Teach and Might Teach Part 3

"A a.s.signment.

Mace's History, pp. 125-197.

Make use of questions and suggested collateral reading at your own option."

For fifth and sixth grades there is a.s.signed a small history text of 200 pages for one or two lessons per week. The two years of the seventh and eighth grades are devoted to the mastery of about 500 pages of text. While there is incidental reference to collateral reading, as a matter of fact the schools are not supplied with the necessary materials for this collateral reading in the grammar grades. The true character of the work is really indicated by the last sentence of the eighth-grade history a.s.signment: "The text of our book should be thoroughly mastered."

In discussing the situation, the first thing to which we must call attention is the great value of history for an understanding of the mult.i.tude of complicated social problems met with by all people in a democracy. In a country where all people are the rulers, all need a good understanding of the social, political, economic, industrial, and other problems with which we are continually confronted. It is true the thing needed is an understanding of present conditions, but there is no better key to a right understanding of our present conditions than history furnishes. One comes to understand a present situation by observing how it has come to be. History is one of the most important methods of social a.n.a.lysis.

The history should be so taught that it will have a demonstrably practical purpose. In drawing up courses of study in the subject for the grammar grades and the high school, the first task should be an a.n.a.lysis of present-day social conditions, the proper understanding of which requires historical background. Once having discovered the list of social topics, it is possible to find historical readings which will show how present conditions have grown up out of earlier ones.

Looked at from a practical point of view, the history should be developed on the basis of topics, a great abundance of reading being provided for each of the topics. We have in mind such topics as the following:

Sociological Aspects of War Territorial Expansion Race Problems Tariff and Free Trade Transportation Money Systems Our Insular Possessions Growth of Population Trusts Banks and Banking Immigration Capital and Labor Education Inventions Suffrage Centralization of Government Strikes and Lockouts Panics and Business Depressions Commerce Taxation Manufacturing Labor Unions Foreign Commerce Agriculture Postal Service Army Government Control of Corporations Munic.i.p.al Government Navy Factory Labor Wages Courts of Law Charities Crime Fire Protection Roads and Road Transportation Newspapers and Magazines National Defense Conservation of Natural Resources Liquor Problems Parks and Playgrounds Housing Conditions Mining Health, Sanitation, etc.

Pensions Unemployment Child Labor Women in Industry Cost of Living Pure Food Control Savings Banks Water Supply of Cities Prisons Recreations and Amus.e.m.e.nts Co-operative Buying and Selling Insurance Hospitals

After drawing up such lists of topics for study, they should be a.s.signed to grammar grades and high school according to the degree of maturity necessary for their comprehension. Naturally as much as possible should be covered in the grammar grades. Such as cannot be covered there should be covered as early as practicable in the high school, since so large a number of students drop out, and all need the work. Of course, this would involve a radical revision of the high school courses in history. It is not here recommended that any such changes be attempted abruptly. There are too many other conditions that require readjustment at the same time. It must all be a gradual growth.

Naturally, students must have some familiarity with the general time relations of history and the general chronological movements of affairs before they can understand the more or less specialized treatment of individual topics. Preliminary studies are therefore both necessary and desirable in the intermediate and grammar grades for the purpose of giving the general background. During these grades a great wealth of historical materials should be stored up. Pupils should acquire much familiarity with the history of the ancient oriental nations, Judea, Greece, Rome, the states of modern Europe and America.

The purpose should be to give a general, and in the beginning a relatively superficial, overview of the world's history for the sake of perspective. The reading should be biographical, anecdotal, thrilling dramas of human achievement, rich with human interest.

It should be at every stage of the work on the level with the understanding and degree of maturity of the pupils, so that much reading can be covered rapidly. Given the proper conditions--chiefly an abundance of the proper books supplied in sets large enough for cla.s.ses--pupils can cover a large amount of ground, obtain a wealth of historical experience, and acquire a great quant.i.ty of useful information, the main outlines of which are remembered without much difficulty. They can in this manner lay a broad historical foundation for the study of the social topics that should begin by the seventh grade and continue throughout the high school.

The textbooks of the present type can be employed as a part of this preliminary training. Read in their entirety and read rapidly, they give one that perspective which comes from a comprehensive view of the entire field. But they are too brief, abstract, and barren to afford valuable concrete historical experience. They are excellent reference books for gaining and keeping historical perspective.

Reading of the character that we have here called preliminary should not cease as the other historical studies are taken up. The general studies should certainly continue for some portion of the time through the grammar grades and high school, but it probably should be mainly supervised reading of interesting materials rather than recitation and examination work.

We would recommend that the high schools give careful attention to the recommendation of the National Education a.s.sociation Committee on the Reorganization of the Secondary Course of Study in History.

CIVICS

Civic training scarcely finds a place upon the elementary school program. The manual suggests that one-quarter of the history time--10 to 20 minutes per week--in the fifth and sixth grades should be given to a discussion of such civic topics as the department of public service, street cleaning, garbage disposal, health and sanitation, the city water supply, the mayor and the council, the treasurer, and the auditor. The topics are important, but the time allowed is inadequate and the pupils of these grades are so immature that no final treatment of such complicated matters is possible. For seventh and eighth grades, the manual makes no reference to civics. This is the more surprising because Cleveland is a city in which there has been no end of civic discussion and progressive human-welfare effort. The extraordinary value of civic education in the elementary school, as a means of furthering civic welfare, should have received more decided recognition.

The elementary teachers and princ.i.p.als of Cleveland might profitably make such a civic survey as that made in Cincinnati as the method of discovering the topics that should enter into a grammar grade course.

The heavy emphasis upon this subject should be reserved for the later grades of the elementary school.

In the high schools, a little is being accomplished. In the academic high schools, those who take the cla.s.sical course receive no civics whatever. It is not even elective for them. Those who take the scientific or English courses may take civics as a half-year elective.

In the technical high schools it is required of all for a half-year.

The course is offered only in the senior year, except in the High School of Commerce, where it is offered in the third. As a result of these various circ.u.mstances, the majority of students who enter and complete the course in the high schools of Cleveland receive no civic training whatever--not even the inadequate half-year of work that is available for a few.

Whether the deficiencies here pointed out are serious or not depends in large measure upon the character of the other social subjects, such as history and geography. If these are developed in full and concrete ways, they illumine large numbers of our difficult social problems.

It is probable that the larger part of the informational portions of civic training should be imparted through these other social subjects.

Whether very much of this is actually done at present is doubtful; for the history teaching, as has already been noted, is much underdeveloped, and while somewhat further advanced, geography work is still far from adequate at the time this report is written.

GEOGRAPHY

Geography in Cleveland is given the customary amount of time, though it is distributed over the grades in a somewhat unusual way. It is exceptionally heavy in the intermediate grades and correspondingly light in the grammar grades. As geography, like all other subjects, is more and more humanized and socialized in its reference, much more time will be called for in the last two grammar grades.

TABLE 9.---TIME GIVEN TO GEOGRAPHY =========================================================== | Hours per year | Per cent of grade time| Grade |----------------------------------------------- | Cleveland | 50 cities| Cleveland | 50 cities | ----------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 0 | 16 | 0.0 | 1.8 | 2 | 0 | 7 | 0.0 | 0.8 | 3 | 28 | 50 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 4 | 101 | 83 | 11.4 | 8.5 | 5 | 125 | 102 | 14.3 | 11.2 | 6 | 125 | 107 | 14.3 | 11.0 | 7 | 57 | 98 | 6.4 | 9.9 | 8 | 57 | 76 | 6.4 | 7.6 | =========================================================== Total | 493 | 539 | 7.2 | 7.1 | -----------------------------------------------------------

As laid out in the manual now superseded, and as observed in the regular cla.s.srooms, the work has been forbiddingly formal. In the main it has consisted of the teacher a.s.signing to the pupils a certain number of paragraphs or pages in the textbook as the next lesson, and then questioning them next day to ascertain how much of this printed material they have remembered and how well. It has not consisted of stimulating and guiding the children toward intelligent inquisitiveness and inquiring interest as to the world, and the skies above, and waters round about, and the conditions of nature that limit and shape the development of mankind.

That the latter is the proper end of geographical teaching is being recognized in developing the new course of study in this subject.

Industries, commerce, agriculture, and modes of living are becoming the centers about which geographic thought and experience are gathered. The best work now being done here is thoroughly modern.

Unfortunately it is not yet great in amount in even the best of the schools, still less in the majority. But the direction of progress is unmistakable and unquestionably correct.

As in the reading, so in geography, right development of the course of study must depend in large measure upon the material equipment that is at the same time provided. It sounds like a legitimate evasion to say that education is a spiritual process, and that good teachers and willing, obedient, and industrious pupils are about all that is required. As a matter of fact, just as modern business has found it necessary to install one-hundred-dollar typewriters to take the place of the penny quill pens, so must education, to be efficient, develop and employ the elaborate tools needed by new and complex modern conditions, and set aside the tools that were adequate in a simpler age. The proper teaching of geography requires an abundance of reading materials of the type that will permit pupils to enter vividly into the varied experience of all cla.s.ses of people in all parts of the world. In the supplementary books now furnished the schools, only a beginning has been made. The schools need 10 times as much geographical reading as that now found in the best equipped school.

It would be well to drop the term "supplementary." This reading should be the basic geographic experience, the fundamental instrument of the teaching. All else is supplementary. The textbook then becomes a reference book of maps, charts, summaries, and a treatment for the sake of perspective. Maps, globes, pictures, stereoscopes, stereopticon, moving-picture machine, models, diagrams, and museum materials, are all for the purpose of developing ideas and imagery of details. The reading should become and remain fundamental and central.

The quant.i.ty required is so great as to make it necessary for the city to furnish the books. While the various other things enumerated are necessary for complete effectiveness, many of them could well wait until the reading materials are sufficiently supplied.

In the high schools the clear tendency is to introduce more of the industrial and commercial geography and to diminish the time given to the less valuable physiography. The development is not yet vigorous.

The high school geography departments, so far as observed, have not yet altogether attained the social point of view. But they are moving in that direction. On the one hand, they now need stimulation; and on the other, to be supplied with the more advanced kinds of such material equipment as already suggested for the elementary schools.

DRAWING AND APPLIED ART

The elementary schools are giving the usual proportion of time to drawing and applied art. The time is distributed, however, in a somewhat unusual, but probably justifiable, manner. Whereas the subject usually receives more time in the primary grades than in the grammar grades, in Cleveland, in quite the reverse way, the subject receives its greatest emphasis in the higher grades.

TABLE 10.--TIME GIVEN TO DRAWING =========================================================== | Hours per year | Per cent of grade time| Grade |----------------------------------------------- | Cleveland | 50 cities| Cleveland | 50 cities | ----------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 47 | 98 | 6.5 | 11.3 | 2 | 47 | 54 | 5.3 | 6.0 | 3 | 47 | 56 | 5.3 | 6.2 | 4 | 47 | 53 | 5.3 | 5.5 | 5 | 57 | 50 | 6.4 | 5.2 | 6 | 57 | 50 | 6.4 | 5.1 | 7 | 57 | 50 | 6.4 | 5.0 | 8 | 57 | 49 | 6.4 | 4.9 | =========================================================== Total | 416 | 460 | 6.1 | 6.1 | -----------------------------------------------------------

Drawing has been taught in Cleveland as a regular portion of the curriculum since 1849. It has therefore had time for substantial growth; and it appears to have been successful. Recent developments in the main have been wholesome and in line with best modern progress.

The course throughout attempts to develop an understanding and appreciation of the principles of graphic art plus ability to use these principles through practical application in constructive activities of an endlessly varied sort.

Occasionally the work appears falsetto and even sentimental. It is often applied in artificial schoolroom ways to things without significance. General grade teachers cannot be specialists in the multiplicity of things demanded of them; it is not therefore surprising that they sometimes lack skill, insight, ingenuity, and resourcefulness. Too often the teachers do not realize that the study of drawing and design is for the serious purpose of giving to pupils a language and form of thought of the greatest practical significance in our present age. The result is a not infrequent use of schoolroom exercises that do not greatly aid the pupils as they enter the busy world of practical affairs.

These shortcomings indicate incompleteness in the development. Where the teaching is at its best in both the elementary and high schools of Cleveland, the work exhibits balanced understanding and complete modernness. The thing needed is further expansion of the best, and the extension of this type of work through specially trained departmental teachers to all parts of the city.

There should be a larger amount of active co-operation between the teachers of art and design and the teachers of manual training; also between both sets of teachers and the general community.

MANUAL TRAINING AND HOUSEHOLD ARTS

In the grammar grades manual and household training receives an average proportion of the time. In the grades before the seventh, the subject receives considerably less than the usual amount of time.

TABLE 11.--TIME GIVEN TO MANUAL TRAINING ======+=======================+======================== | Hours per year | Per cent of grade time Grade +-----------+-----------+-----------+------------ | Cleveland | 50 cities | Cleveland | 50 cities ------+-----------+-----------+-----------+------------ 1 | 32 | 42 | 4.3 | 4.8 2 | 32 | 47 | 3.5 | 5.1 3 | 32 | 40 | 3.5 | 4.5 4 | 32 | 45 | 3.5 | 4.6 5 | 38 | 50 | 4.3 | 5.2 6 | 38 | 57 | 4.3 | 5.8 7 | 63 | 72 | 7.1 | 7.1 8 | 63 | 74 | 7.1 | 7.4 ------+-----------+-----------+-----------+------------ Total | 330 | 427 | 4.8 | 5.6 ------+-----------+-----------+-----------+------------

It is easy to see the social and educational justification of courses in sewing, cooking, household sanitation, household decoration, etc., for the girls. They a.s.sist in the training for complicated vocational activities performed in some degree at least by most women. Where women are so situated that they do not actually perform them, they need, for properly supervising others and for making intelligible and appreciative use of the labors of others, a considerable understanding of these various matters.