material which the children themselves can handle and from which they may get their own lessons. This work is fitted into the regular curriculum; it is not dependent on any peculiarities of an individual teacher, but may be introduced throughout the entire system, just as text-books are now uniform through a large number of schools.
The work has been applied principally in history and civics for the younger grades, but it is easy to imagine how the same sort of thing could be used in geography or some of the other subjects. The history in the younger grades is taught largely by means of sand tables. The children are perhaps studying the primitive methods of building houses, and on their sand table they build a brush house, a cave dwelling, a tree house, or an eskimo snow hut. The children themselves do all the work. The teacher steps in with advice and help only when necessary to prevent real errors, but the pupils are given the problem of the manufacture of the house they are studying, and are expected to solve it for themselves. Sand tables are used in the same way by a third grade in their study of the early history of Chicago. They mold the sand into a rough relief map of the neighborhood and then with twigs build the forts and log cabins of the first frontier settlement, with an Indian encampment just outside the stockade. They put real water in their lake and river, and float canoes in it. Other grades do the same thing with the history of transportation among the first settlers in this country, and with the logging and lumber industry. The older grades are studying the government of their city, and make sand tables to illustrate the different departments of city government. One room has a life-saving station, with different types of boats, and life lines that work. Others have the telephone, mail carrier, and parcel posts systems, and a system of street cleaning of which the children are particularly proud, because they have copied conditions which they actually found in some of the alleys near the school buildings. Beside the alleys which were dirty, like those in the neighborhood, they have constructed a model alley with sanitary garbage appliances made on the best plane based on what the teacher has told them about systems in other cities.
In another building all the pupils above the fourth grade have organized into civic clubs. They divided the school district into smaller districts and one club took charge of each district, making surveys and maps of their own territory, counting lamp posts, alleys, and garbage cans, and the number of policemen, or going intensively into the one thing which interested them most. Then each club decided what they wanted to do for their own district and set out to accomplish it, whether it was the cleaning up of a bad alley or the better lighting of a street. They used all the methods that an adult citizens’ club would employ, writing letters to the city departments, calling at the City Hall, and besides actually went into the alleys and cleaned them up. The interest and enthusiasm of the pupils in this work was remarkable and they are now undertaking a campaign to get a playground for the school, by means of advertising and holding neighborhood meetings. The English work in these grades is based on the work of the clubs; the pupils keep track of the work they do, make maps and write letters.
Most of the hand and industrial work, which is not taught for strictly vocational purposes illustrates the principles which “learning by doing” stand for. Examples of this are to be found in nearly all schools to-day which aim to be progressive. Many school systems all over the country have tried having a printing press operated by pupils with great success. The presses were installed not to teach the pupils the different processes in the trade, but so that the children might themselves print some of the pamphlets, posters, or other papers that any school is constantly needing. Besides the interest that the pupils have shown in setting up the type, operating the presses, and getting out the printed matter, the work has proved itself especially valuable in the teaching of English. Type setting is an excellent method of drilling in spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, and grammar, for the fact that the copy is going to be printed furnishes a motive for eliminating mistakes which exercises written by a pupil for his teacher never provides. Proofreading is another exercise of the same sort. In such schools the press publishes practically all the printed matter that is needed during the year, including spelling lists, programs, and school papers.
Schools are trying all sorts of experiments to make the work in English concrete. The text-book method of teaching--learning rules and definitions and then doing exercises in their application--has proved unsuccessful. Every teacher is familiar with the story of the boy who wrote, “I have gone,” on a piece of paper fifty times, in order to impress the correct form on his mind, and then on the bottom of the page left a note for the teacher beginning, “I have went home.” A purpose in English work seems absolutely necessary, for the child sees no gain in efficiency in the things he is most interested in due to progress in isolated grammar or spelling. When the progress is brought about as a by-product of the scholars’ other work the case is quite otherwise. Give him a reason for writing, for spelling, punctuating, and paragraphing, for using his verbs correctly, and improvement becomes a natural demand of experience. Mr. Wirt in the Gary, Ind., schools has found this so true that the regular English required by the state curriculum has been supplemented by “application periods in English.” In these hours the class in carpentry or cooking discusses the English used in doing their work in those subjects, and corrects from the language point of view any written work done as part of their other activity. A pupil in one of these classes, who had been corrected for a mistake in grammar, was overheard saying, “Well, why didn’t they tell us that in English?” to which her neighbor answered, “They did, but we didn’t know what they were talking about.”
In some schools as in the Francis Parker School, Chicago, and in the Cottage School at Riverside, Ill., English is not taught as a separate subject to the younger grades, but the pupils have compositions to write for their history lessons, keep records of their excursions, and of other work where they do not use text-books. The emphasis is put on helping the child to express his ideas; but such work affords ample opportunity for the drill in the required mechanics of writing. Grammar no longer appears as a separate subject in the Chicago public school curriculum; the teacher gives a lesson in grammar every time any one in the classroom talks and with every written exercise.
However, grammar can be given a purpose and made interesting even to eleven-year-old children, if the pupils are helped to make their own grammar and rules by doing their own analyzing as the first step instead of the last. This is being done with great success in the Phœbe Thorn Experimental School of Bryn Mawr College. Grammar had no place on the curriculum, but the pupils asked so many questions that their teacher decided to let them discover their own grammatical rules, starting from the questions they had asked. A few minutes were taken from the English hour two or three times a week for their lessons. At the end of three months the class could analyze any simple sentence, could tell a transitive from an intransitive verb instantly, and were thoroughly familiar with the rules governing the verb to be. The grammar lesson was one of the favorite lessons; the teacher and pupils together had invented a number of games to help their drill. For example, one child had a slip of paper pinned to her back describing a sentence in grammatical terms; the class made sentences that fitted the sentence, and the first pupil had to guess what her paper said.
No text book was used in the work, and the teacher started with the sentence, called it a town, and by discussion helped the pupils to divide it up into districts--singular, plural, etc. Starting from this, they developed other grammatical rules. The general tendency in the progressive schools to-day, nevertheless, seems to be toward the elimination of the separate study of grammar, and toward making it and the remainder of the English work (with the exception of literature) a part of other subjects which the class is studying.
The motto of the boys’ school at Interlaken, Ind., “To teach boys to live,” is another way of saying, “learning by doing.” Here this is accomplished, not so much by special devices to render the curriculum more vital and concrete, and by the abolition of text-books with the old-fashioned reservoir and pump relation of pupil and teacher, as by giving the boys an environment which is full of interesting things that need to be done.
The school buildings have been built by the pupils, including four or five big log structures, the plans being drawn, the foundations dug and laid, and the carpentry and painting on the building done by boy labor.
The electric light and heating plant is run by the boys, and all the wiring and bulbs were put in and are kept in repair by them. There is a six hundred acre farm, with a dairy, a piggery and hennery, and crops to be sowed and gathered. Nearly all this work is also done by pupils; the big boys driving the reapers and binders and the little boys going along to see how it is done. The inside of the houses are taken care of in the same way by the students. Each boy looks after his own room, and the work in the corridors and schoolrooms is attended to by changing shifts. There is a lake for swimming and canoeing, and plenty of time for the conventional athletics. Most of the boys are preparing for college, but this outdoor and manual work does not mean that they have to take any longer for their preparation than the boy in the city high school.
The school has also bought the local newspaper from the neighboring village and edits and prints a four-page weekly paper of local and school news. The boys gather the news, do much of the writing and all of the editing and printing, and are the business managers, getting advertisements and tending to the subscription list. The instructors in the English department give the boys any needed assistance. They do all these things, not because they want to know certain processes that will help them earn a living after they are through school, but because to use tools, to move from one kind of work to another, to meet different kinds of problems, to exercise outdoors, and to learn to supply one’s daily needs are educating influences, which develop skill, initiative, independence, and bodily strength--in a word, character and knowledge.
Work in nature study is undergoing reorganization in many schools in all parts of the country. The attempt is to vitalize the work, so that pupils shall actually get a feeling for plants and animals, together with some real scientific knowledge, not simply the rather sentimental descriptions and rhapsodizings of literature. It is also different from the information gathering type of nature study, which is no more real science than is the literary type. Here the pupils are taught a large number of isolated facts, starting from material that the teacher gathers in a more or less miscellaneous way; they learn all about one object after another, each one unrelated to the others or to any general plan of work. Even though a child has gone over a large number of facts about the outdoor world, he gains little or nothing which makes nature itself more real or more understandable.
If nature study is turned into a science, the real material of the subject must be at hand for the students; there must be a laboratory, with provision for experimentation and observation. In the country this is easy, for nature is just outside the school doors and windows.
The work can be organized in the complete way that has already been described in the schools at Fairhope and Columbia.
The Cottage School at Riverside, Ill., and the Little School in the Woods at Greenwich, Conn., both put a great deal of stress on their nature study work. At the former, the children have a garden where they plant early and late vegetables, so that they can use them for their cooking class in the spring and fall; the pupils do all the work here, plant, weed, and gather the things. Even more important is the work they do with animals. They have, for example, a rare bird that is as much a personality in the school life as any of the children, and the children, having cared for him and watched his growth and habits, have become much more interested in wild birds. In the backyard is a goat, the best liked thing on the place, which the children have raised from a little kid; and they still do all the work of caring for him. They are encouraged in every way to watch and report on the school pets and also on the animals they find in the woods.
In the Little School in the Woods at Greenwich outdoor work is the basis of the whole school organization. Nature study plays a large part in this. Groups of pupils take long walks through the woods in all seasons and weathers, learning the trees in all their dresses, and the flowers which come with each season. They learn to know the birds and their habits; they study insects in the same way, and learn about the stars. In fact, so much of their time is spent out of doors, that the pupils acquire first hand a large fund of knowledge of the world of nature in all its phases. The basis of this work, the director of the school calls Woodcraft; he believes that experience in the things the woodman does--riding, hunting, camping, scouting, mountaineering, Indian-craft, boating, etc.--will make strong, healthy, and independent young people with well developed characters and a true sense of the beauty of nature. The nature study then is a part of this other training. A teacher is always with the pupils, whether they are boating, walking, or gardening, to explain what they are doing and why, and to call their attention to the things about them. There is no doubt that the children in the school, even the very little ones, have a knowledge and appreciation of nature which are very rare even among country children.
Nature study in the big city, where the only plants are in parks and formal yards and where the only animals are the delivery horse and the alley cat, offers a very different problem. The teacher may well be puzzled as to the best way to teach her pupils to love nature when they never see it; or be doubtful as to the value of trying to develop powers of observation when the things which they are asked to observe not only do not play any part in the lives of the pupils but are in quite artificial surroundings. Yet while wild nature, the world of woods and fields and streams, is almost meaningless to the city bred child, there is plenty of material available to make nature a very real thing even for the child who has never seen a tree or cow. The modern teacher takes as a starting point anything that is familiar to the class; a caged canary, a bowl of gold fish, or the dusty trees on the playground, and starting from these she introduces the children to more and more of nature, until they can really get some idea of “the country” and the part it plays in the lives of every one. The vegetable garden is the obvious starting point for most city children; if they do not have tiny gardens in their own backyards, there is a neighbor who has, or they are interested to find out where the vegetables they eat come from and how they are grown.
Both in Indianapolis and Chicago, the public schools realize the value of this sort of work for the children. In Indianapolis, gardening is a regular department in the seventh and eighth grades and the high school. The city has bought a large tract of land far enough in town to be accessible, and any child who cannot have a garden at home may, by asking, have a garden plot together with lessons in the theory and practice of gardening. The plots are large enough for the pupils to gain considerable experience and to put into practice what they learn in the classroom. Both boys and girls have the gardens, and are given credit for work in them just as for other work. All through the school system every attempt is made to arouse an interest in gardening. From the first grade on, statistics are kept of the numbers of children with gardens at home, whether they are vegetable or flower gardens, and what is grown. Seeds are given to the children who wish to grow new things, and the child is supposed to account to his grade for the use he has made of his garden.
This work has become a matter of course in many rural districts; every one is familiar with the “corn clubs” among the school children of the South and West, and the splendid example they have set the farmers as to the possibilities of the soil. In many small towns seeds are given to the children who want gardens, and in the fall a competitive flower and vegetable show is held, where prizes are given, as a means of keeping track of the work and arousing community interest. It is true that most of these efforts have been grafted on to the schools by the local agricultural interests, in an effort to improve the crops and so increase the wealth of the neighborhood; but local school boards are beginning to take the work over, and it is no less real nature study work because of its utilitarian color. It may be made a means of making a real science of nature study; in no way does it hinder the teaching of the beauty and usefulness of nature, which was the object of the old-fashioned study. In fact, it is the strongest weapon the school can make use of for this purpose. Every one, and children especially, enjoy and respect most the things about which their fund of knowledge is largest. The true value of anything is most apparent to the person who knows something about it. Familiarity with growing things and with the science of getting food supplies for a people, cannot fail to be a big influence towards habits of industry and observation, for only the gardener who watches all the stages and conditions of his garden, seeking constantly for causes, will be successful. Added to this is the purely economic value of having our young people grow up with a real respect for the farmer and his work, a respect which should counteract that overwhelming flow of population toward congested cities.
The work in the Chicago public schools has not been organized as it is in Indianapolis, but in some districts of the city a great deal of emphasis is put on nature study work through gardens. Many of the schools have school gardens where all the children get an opportunity to do real gardening, these gardens being used as the basis for the nature study work, and the children getting instruction in scientific gardening besides. The work is given a civic turn; that is to say, the value of the gardens to the child and to the neighborhood is demonstrated: to the child as a means of making money or helping his family by supplying them with vegetables, to the community in showing how gardens are a means of cleaning up and beautifying the neighborhood. If the residents want their backyards and empty lots for gardens, they are not going to throw rubbish into them or let other people do so. Especially in the streets around one school has this work made a difference. Starting with the interest and effort of the children, the whole community has become tremendously interested in starting gardens, using every bit of available ground. The district is a poor one and, besides transforming the yards, the gardens have been a real economic help to the people. With the help of one school a group of adults in the district hired quite a large tract of land outside the city and started truck gardens. The experiment was a great success.
Inexperienced city dwellers, by taking advantage of the opportunities for instruction which the school could offer, were able to plan and do the work and make the garden a success from the start. The advantage to the school was just as great, for a large group of foreign parents came into close touch with it, discovered that it was a real force in the neighborhood, and that they could coöperate with it. This element of the population usually stands quite aloof from the school its children go to, through timidity and ignorance, or simply through feeling that it is an institution above them.
The impetus to “civic nature study” in Chicago, aside from the district just described, has come largely from the Chicago Teachers’ College, where the teacher of biology has devoted himself especially to working out this problem. In addition to the familiar gardening work, with especial attention to the organization of truck gardening, plants are grown in the classroom for purposes of developing appreciation of beauty, scientific illustration, and assistance in geography. But plants are selected with special reference to local conditions, and with the desire to furnish a stimulus to beautifying the pupils’ own environment. For it is found that the scientific principles of botany can be taught by means of growing plants which are adapted to home use as well as by specimens selected on abstract scientific grounds. By making a special study of the parks, playgrounds, and yards of their surroundings, the children learn what can be done to beautify their city, and secure an added practical motive for acquiring information.
They keep pets in the schoolroom, such as white mice, fish, birds, and rabbits. While these are utilized, of course, for illustrating principles of animal structure and physiology, they are also employed to teach humaneness to animals and a general sympathy for animal life.
This is easy, for children are naturally even more interested in animals than in plants, and the animals become real individualities to the children whose needs are to be respected. As the effect of conditions upon the health and vigor of their pets is noted, there is a natural growth of interest in questions of personal hygiene.
It will be observed that while nature study is used to instill the elements of science, its chief uses are to cultivate a sympathetic understanding of the place of plants and animals in life and to develop emotional and æsthetic interest. In the larger cities the situation is very different from that of rural life and the country village. There are thousands of children who believe that cement and bricks are the natural covering of the ground, trees and grass being to them the unusual and artificial thing. Their thoughts do not go beyond the fact that milk and butter and eggs come from the store; cows and chickens are unknown to them--so much so that in a recent reunion of old settlers in a congested district of New York one of the greatest curiosities was a live cow imported from the country.
Under such circumstances, it is difficult to make the scientific problems of nature study of vital interest. There are no situations of the children’s experience into which the facts and principles enter as a matter of course. Even the weather is tempered and the course of the changing seasons has no special effect upon the lives of the pupils, save upon the need for greater warmth in winter. Nature study in the city is like one of the fine arts, such as painting or music; its value is æsthetic rather than directly practical. Nature is such a small factor in the activities of the children that it is hard to give it much “disciplinary” value, save as it is turned to civic ends.
A vague feeling for this state of affairs probably accounts for much of the haphazard and half-hearted nature study teaching which goes on in city schools. There is a serious problem in finding material for city children which will do for observation what the facts of nature accomplish in the case of rural children.
A valuable experiment with this end in view is carried on in the little “Play School” taught by Miss Pratt in one of the most congested districts of New York City. Nature study is not taught at all to these little children. If they go to the park or have pets and plant flowers it is because these things make good play material, because they are beautiful and interesting; if the children ask questions and want to know more about them, so much the better. Instead of telling them about leaves and grass, cows and butterflies, and hunting out the rare opportunities for the children to observe them, use is made of the multitudes of things which the children see about them in the streets and in their homes. The new building going up across the street furnishes just as much for observation and questioning as does the park, and is a much more familiar sight to the children. They find out how the men get the bricks and mortar to the upper floors; they see the sand cart unloading; possibly one child knows that the driver has been to the river to get the sand from a boat. They notice the delivery man going through the streets, and find out where he got the bread to take to their mothers. They see the children on the playground and learn that besides the fun they have, the playing is good for their bodies. They walk to the river and see the ferries carrying people back and forth and the coal barges unloading. All these facts are more closely related to them than the things of country life; hence it is more important that they understand their meaning and their relation to their own lives, while acuteness of observation is just as well trained. Such work is also equally valuable as a foundation for the science and geography the pupils will study later on. Besides awakening their curiosity and faculties of observation, it shows them the elements of the social world, which the later studies are meant to explain.
The Elementary School at Columbia, Missouri, has arranged its curriculum according to the same principle. All the material from nature which the children use and study they find near the school or their homes, and their study of the seasons and the weather is made from day to day, as the Columbia weather and seasons change. Even more important is the work the children do in studying their own town, their food, clothing, and houses, so that the basis of the study is not instruction given by the teacher but what the children themselves have been able to find out on excursions and by keeping their eyes open.
The material bears a relation to their own lives, and so is the more available for teaching children how to live. The reasons for teaching such things to the city bred child are the same as those for teaching the country child the elements of gardening and the possibilities of the local soil. By understanding his own environment child or adult learns the measure of the beauty and order about him, and respect for real achievement, while he is laying the foundations for his own control of the environment.
CHAPTER V PLAY All peoples at all times have depended upon plays and games for a large part of the education of children, especially of young children. Play is so spontaneous and inevitable that few educational writers have accorded to it in theory the place it held in practice, or have tried to find out whether the natural play activities of children afforded suggestions that could be adopted within school walls. Plato among the ancients and Froebel among the moderns are the two great exceptions.
From both Rousseau and Pestalozzi, Froebel learned the principle of education as a natural development. Unlike both of these men, however, he loved intellectual system and had a penchant for a somewhat mystical metaphysics. Accordingly we find in both his theory and practice something of the same inconsistency noted in Pestalozzi.
It is easier to say natural development than to find ways for assuring it. There is much that is “natural” in children which is also naturally obnoxious to adults. There are many manifestations which do not seem to have any part in helping on growth. Impatient desire for a method which would cover the whole ground, and be final so as to be capable of use by any teacher, led Froebel, as it has led so many others, into working out alleged “laws” of development which were to be followed irrespective of the varying circumstances and experiences of different children. The orthodox kindergarten, which has often been more Froebellian than Froebel himself, followed these laws; but now we find attempts to return to the spirit of his teaching, with more or less radical changes in its letter.
While Froebel’s own sympathy with children and his personal experience led him to emphasize the instinctive expressions of child-life, his philosophy led him to believe that natural development consisted in the _un_folding of an absolute and universal principle already _en_folded in the child. He believed also that there is an exact correspondence between the general properties of external objects and the unfolding qualities of mind, since both were manifestations of the same absolute reality. Two practical consequences followed which often got the upper hand of his interest in children on their own account. One was that, since the law of development could be laid down in general, it is not after all so important to study children in the concrete to find out what natural development consists in. If they vary from the requirements of the universal law so much the worse for them, not for the “law.” Teachers were supposed to have the complete formula of development already in their hands. The other consequence was that the presentation and handling, according to prescribed formulæ, of external material, became the method in detail of securing proper development. Since the general relations of these objects, especially the mathematical ones, were manifestations of the universal principle behind development, they formed the best means of bringing out the hidden existence of the same principle in the child. Even the spontaneous plays of children were thought to be educative not because of what they are, directly in themselves, but because they symbolize some law of universal being. Children should gather, for example, in a circle, not because a circular grouping is convenient for social and practical purposes, but because the circle is a symbol of infinity which will tend to evoke the infinite latent in the child’s soul.
The efforts to return to Froebel’s spirit referred to above have tried to keep the best in his contributions. His emphasis upon play, dramatization, songs and story telling, which involve the constructive use of material, his deep sense of the importance of social relations among the children--these things are permanent contributions which they retain. But they are trying with the help of the advances of psychological knowledge since Froebel’s time and of the changes in social occupations which have taken place to utilize these factors directly, rather than indirectly, through translation into a metaphysics, which, even if true, is highly abstract. In another respect they are returning to Froebel himself, against an alteration in his ideas introduced by many of his disciples. These followers have set up a sharp contrast between play and useful activity or work, and this has rendered the practices of their kindergartens more symbolic and sentimental than they otherwise would have been. Froebel himself emphasized the desirability of children sharing in social occupations quite as much as did Pestalozzi--whose school he had visited. He says, for example, “The young, growing human being should be trained early for outer work, for creative and productive activities. Lessons through and by work, through and from life, are the most impressive and the most intelligible, the most continuous and progressive, in themselves and in their effect upon the learner. Every child, boy and youth, whatever his position and condition in life, should devote, say, at least one or two hours a day to some serious active occupation constructing some definite external piece of work. It would be a most wholesome arrangement in school to establish actual working hours similar to existing study hours, and it will surely come to this.” In the last sentence, Froebel showed himself a true prophet of what has been accomplished in some of the schools such as we are dealing with in this book.
Schools all over the country are at present making use of the child’s instinct for play, by using organized games, toy making, or other construction based on play motives as part of the regular curriculum.
This is in line with the vitalization of the curriculum that is going on in the higher grades by making use of the environment of the child outside the schoolroom. If the most telling lessons can be given children through bringing into the school their occupations in their free hours, it is only natural to use play as a large share of the work for the youngest pupils. Certainly the greatest part of the lives of very young children is spent in playing, either games which they learn from older children or those of their own invention. The latter usually take the form of imitations of the occupations of their elders.
All little children think of playing house, doctor, or soldier, even if they are not given toys which suggest these games; indeed, half of the joy of playing comes from finding and making the necessary things.
The educational value of this play is obvious. It teaches the children about the world they live in. The more they play the more elaborate becomes their paraphernalia, the whole game being a fairly accurate picture of the daily life of their parents in its setting, clothed in the language and bearing of the children. Through their games they learn about the work and play of the grown-up world. Besides noticing the elements which make up this world, they find out a good deal about the actions and processes that are necessary to keep it going.
While this is of real value in teaching the child how to live, it is evident as well that it supplies a strong influence against change.
Imitative plays tend, by the training of habit and the turn they give to the child’s attention and thoughts, to make his life a replica of the life of his parents. In playing house children are just as apt to copy the coarseness, blunders, and prejudices of their elders as the things which are best. In playing, they notice more carefully and thus fix in their memory and habits, more than if they simply lived it indifferently, the whole color of the life around them. Therefore, while imitative games are of great educational value in the way of