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