(1) The games of pupils. Do they in a thoroughly childlike manner still play with any object that comes to hand? Do they intentionally change their games to suit a varying preference? Can distinct objects of persistent desire be discovered?
(2) Their mental capacity and processes as shown in their studies. Is the pupil able to grasp long or only short series? Does he make many or few slips in the recitation? Do his lessons find a spontaneous echo in his play?
(3) Their depth and consistency. Are their utterances superficial, or do they come from the depths of the soul? A comparative study of words and actions will gradually answer this question.
Such observations will take account also of the rhythm of the pupil’s mental life as well as of the character of his store of thoughts. The insight thus obtained determines the matter and method of instruction.
The reader will not fail to notice that much of modern child study is anticipated in the foregoing paragraphs. Further important contributions to the same subject are made in paragraphs 294–329.
35. Instruction in the sense of mere information-giving contains no guarantee whatever that it will materially counteract faults and influence existing groups of ideas that are independent of the imparted information. But it is these ideas that education must reach; for the kind and extent of assistance that instruction may render to conduct depend upon the hold it has upon them.
Facts, at least, must serve as material for methodical treatment, otherwise they do not enlarge even the scope of mental activity. They rise in value when they become instinct with life and acquire mobility so as to enrich the imagination. But their ethical effect always remains questionable so long as they do not help to correct or modify the ethical judgment, or desire and action, or both.
This point calls for a few additional distinctions. Generally speaking, rudeness decreases in proportion to the expansion of the mental horizon by instruction. The mere diffusion of desires over the enlarged thought area causes them to lose something of their one-sided energy. Moreover, if instruction presents ethical subjects of some kind in a comprehensible way, the pupil’s disposition undergoes a refining process so that it at least approximates a correct estimate of the will, that is, the creation of ethical ideas.
Such favorable results are, however, apt to be outweighed by the harm done when mere knowledge becomes the chief aim of ambition.
36. In order that instruction may act on the pupil’s ideas and disposition, every avenue of approach should be thrown open. The mere fact that we can never know with certainty, beforehand, what will influence the pupil most, warns us against one-sidedness of instruction.
Ideas spring from two main sources—experience and social intercourse. Knowledge of nature—incomplete and crude—is derived from the former; the later furnishes the sentiments entertained toward our fellow-men, which, far from being praiseworthy, are on the contrary often very reprehensible. To improve these is the more urgent task; but neither ought we to neglect the knowledge of nature. If we do, we may expect error, fantastical notions, and eccentricities of every description.
37. Hence, we have two main branches of instruction—the historical and the scientific. The former embraces not only history proper, but language study as well; the latter includes, besides natural science, mathematics.
“Historical” must be interpreted to include all human sciences, such as history, literature, languages, æsthetics, and political, economic, and social science. “Scientific” may include applied as well as pure science, and then we add all forms of industrial training to the curriculum. Other divisions of the subject-matter of instruction are often helpful. Thus one may speak of the human sciences, the natural sciences, and the economic sciences. The economic sciences include those activities where man and nature interact. Dr. Wm. T. Harris speaks of five coördinate groups of subjects, corresponding to what he calls the “five windows of the soul.”
38. Other reasons aside, the need alone of counteracting selfishness renders it necessary for every school that undertakes the education of the whole man to place human conditions and relations in the foreground of instruction. This humanistic aim should underlie the studies of the historical subjects, and only with reference to this aim may they be allowed to preponderate.
An interesting attempt to realize the aim here demanded is found in Professor John Dewey’s “School and Society,”[1] which is in effect a description of what he is working out in his practice or experimental school in connection with his department in the University of Chicago.
“If the aim of historical instruction is to enable the child to appreciate the values of social life, to see in imagination the forces which favor and let men’s effective coöperations with one another, to understand the sorts of character that help on and that hold back, the essential thing in its presentation is to make it moving, dynamic. History must be presented not as an accumulation of results or effects, a mere statement of what has happened, but as a forceful, acting thing. The motives, that is, the motors, must stand out. To study history is not to amass information, but to use information in constructing a vivid picture of how and why men did thus and so: achieved their successes and came to their failures.”[2]
Note.—This view does not shut out the other held in regard to Gymnasia, namely, that their business is to preserve and perpetuate a knowledge of classical antiquity; the latter aim must be made congruent with the former.
[1] Dewey, “The School and Society,” University of Chicago Press, 1899.
[2] Dewey, “The Aim of History in Elementary Education,” Elementary School Record, No. 8, University of Chicago Press, 1900.
39. Mathematical studies, from elementary arithmetic to higher mathematics, are to be linked to the pupil’s knowledge of nature, and so to his experience, in order to gain admission into his sphere of thought. Instruction in mathematics, however thorough, fails pedagogically when the ideas generated form an isolated group. They are usually soon forgotten, or, if retained, contribute but little toward personal worth.
It may be added that the leading practical motive in the teaching of arithmetic has been economic, the cost of things forming the chief reliance for problems. Only those parts of nature study that involve important quantitative relations are fitted for correlation with mathematics. Biology, for instance, which is qualitative, since it deals with life, is a poor support for mathematics; but physics is a good one.
40. In general, it will always remain a matter of uncertainty whether and how instruction will be received and mentally elaborated. To diminish this uncertainty, if for no other reasons, there is need of constant endeavor to put the pupil in a frame of mind suitable for instruction. This task falls within the province of training.
41. But even apart from reference to instruction, training must seek to ward off violent desires and to prevent the injurious outbursts of emotion. We may grant that after the days of school life are over, individual traits will always break forth again in this respect; but experiences, too, follow, and in connection with these the after-effect of education comes to light in proportion as education has been more or less successful. It shows itself in the nature and the amount of self-knowledge through which the adult strives to restrain his native faults. Seeming exceptions are in most cases accounted for by impressions produced in very early youth and long concealed.
As