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

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 lyc�es 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 entirely in academic subjects, with some talks on school-keeping and class organization and management added, and at times a little philosophy as to educational work, such as habit-formation, morality, thinking, and the training of the will. Educational journalism did not begin in either Europe or America until near the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and it was 1850 before it attained any significance, and 1840 to 1850 before any important pedagogical literature arose. [23]

 

[Illustration: FIG. 238. KARL GEORG VON RAUMER (1783-1865)]

 

NEW INFLUENCE. In 1843 there appeared, in Germany, the first two volumes of a very celebrated and influential History of Education, by a professor of mineralogy in the University of Erlangen, by the name of Karl Gcorg von Raumer. As a young man in Paris (1808-09), studying the great mineral collections found there, he read and was deeply stirred by Fichte’s “Address to the German Nation” (p. 567). As a result he went to Yverdon, in 1809, and spent some months in studying the work in Pestalozzi’s Institute. This interest in education he never lost, and thereafter, as professor of mineralogy at Halle and Erlangen, he also gave lectures on pedagogy (_Uber P�dagogik_). The outgrowth of these lectures was his four-volume History of Pedagogy from the Revival of Classical Studies to our own Time. [24] The work was done with characteristic German thoroughness, and for long served as a standard organization and text on the history of the development of educational theory and practice since the days of the Revival of Learning. The work of von Raumer stimulated many to a study of the writings of the earlier educational reformers, and numerous books and papers on educational history and theory soon began to appear. Most important, for American students, was Henry Barnard’s monumental American Journal of Education, begun in 1855, and continued for thirty-one years.

This is a great treasure-house of pedagogical literature for American educators.

 

After 1850 the organization of a technique of instruction for the elementary-school subjects took place rapidly, in the normal schools of all lands, as it had earlier in the German teachers’ seminaries. By 1868

the study of the new Herbartian psychology and educational theory was well under way in Germany, and by 1890 in the United States. By 1875 the kindergarten, with its new theory of child life, was also beginning to make itself felt in both Europe and America. Between 1850 and 1875 Weber, Lotze, Fechner, and Wundt laid the foundations for a new psychology (R.

357), and in 1878 Wundt opened the first laboratory for the experimental study of psychology at the University of Leipzig. In 1890 William James published his two-volume work on Principles of Psychology, a book so original and lucid in treatment that it at once gave a new teaching organization to modern psychology. After about 1880, the extension of education upward and outward in the United States, and the rapid development of state school systems which had by that time begun, began to make new demands for