The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

NEW CONCEPTIONS OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS

I. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION OF ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION

THE BEGINNINGS OF NORMAL-SCHOOL TRAINING. The training of would-be teachers for the work of instruction is an entirely modern proceeding. The first class definitely organized for imparting training to teachers, concerning which we have any record, was a small local training group of teachers of reading and the Catechism, conducted by Father D�mia, at Lyons, France, in 1672. The first normal school to be established anywhere was that founded at Rheims, in northern France, in 1685, by Abb� de la Salle (p. 347). He had founded the Order of “The Brothers of the Christian Schools” the preceding year, to provide free religious instruction for children of the working classes in France (R. 182), and he conceived the new idea of creating a special school to train his prospective teachers for the teaching work of his Order. Shortly afterward he established two similar institutions in Paris. Each institution he called a “Seminary for Schoolmasters.” In addition to imparting a general education of the type of the time, and a thorough grounding in religion, his student teachers were trained to teach in practice schools, under the direction of experienced teachers. This was an entirely new idea.

The beginnings elsewhere, as we have previously pointed out were made in German lands, Francke’s Seminarium Praeceptorum, established at Halle (p. 419), in 1697, coming next in point of time. In 1738 Johann Julius Hecker (1707-68), one of Francke’s teachers (p. 562), established the first regular Seminary for Teachers in Prussia, and in 1748 he established a private Lehrerseminar in Berlin. In these two institutions he first showed the German people the possibilities of special training for teachers in the secondary school. In 1753 the Berlin institution was adopted as a Royal Teachers’ Seminary (p. 563) by Frederick the Great.

After this, and in part due to the enthusiastic support of the Berlin institution by the King, the teacher-training idea for secondary teachers began to find favor among the Germans. We accordingly find something like a dozen Teachers’ Seminaries had been founded in German lands before the close of the eighteenth century. [1] A normal school was established in Denmark, by royal decree, as early as 1789, and five additional schools when the law organizing public instruction in Denmark was enacted, in 1814. In France the beginnings of state action came with the action of the National Convention, which decreed the establishment of the “Superior Normal School for France,” in 1794 (p. 517). This institution, though, was short lived, and the real beginnings of the French higher normal school awaited the reorganizing work of Napoleon, in 1808 (p. 595; R. 283).

The schools just mentioned represent the first institutions in the history of the world organized for the purpose of training teachers to teach. The teachers they trained, though, were intended primarily for the secondary schools, and the training was largely academic in character. Only in Silesia was any effort made, before the nineteenth century, to give training in special institutions to teachers intended for the vernacular schools. There Frederick the Great, in his “Regulations for the Catholic Schools of Silesia” (R. 275, a � 2) designated six cathedral and monastery schools as model schools, where teachers could “have the opportunity for learning all that is needed by a good teacher.” In another place he defined this as “skill in singing and playing the organ sufficient to perform the services of the Church,” and “the art of instructing the young in the German language” (R. 275, a � 1). So long as the instruction in the vernacular school consisted chiefly of reading and the Catechism, and of hearing pupils recite what they had memorized, there was of course but little need for any special training for the teachers. It was not until after Pestalozzi had done his work and made his contribution that there was anything worth mentioning to train teachers for.

PESTALOZZI’S CONTRIBUTION. The memorable work done by Pestalozzi in Switzerland, during his quarter-century (1800-25) of effort at Burgdorf and Yverdon, changed the whole face of the preparation of teachers problem. His work was so fundamental that it completely redirected the education of children. Taking the seed-thought of Rousseau that sense-impression was “the only true foundation of human knowledge” (R. 267), he enlarged this to the conception of the mental development of human beings as being organic, and proceeding according to law. His extension of this idea of Rousseau’s led him to declare that education was an individual development, a drawing-out and not a pouring-in; that the basis of all education exists in the nature of man; and that the method of education is to be sought and constructed. [2] These were his great contributions.

These ideas fitted in well with the rising tide of individualism which marked the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, and upon these contributions the modern secular elementary school has been built.

These ideas led Pestalozzi to emphasize sense perception and expression; to formulate the rule that in teaching we must proceed from the concrete to the abstract; and to construct a “faculty psychology” which conceived of education as “a harmonious development” of the different “faculties” of the mind. He also tried, unsuccessfully to be sure, to so organize the teaching process that eventually it could be so “mechanized” that there would be a regular A, B, C, for each type of instruction, which, once learned, would give perfection to a teacher. In his Report of 1800 (R.

267), which forms a very clear statement of his aims, he had said: I know what I am undertaking; but neither