MANUALS My Pedagogic Creed By PROF. JOHN DEWEY AND The Demands of Sociology Upon Pedagogy By PROF. ALBION W. SMALL With an Introduction by S. T. Dutton A. FLANAGAN COMPANY CHICAGO Methods and Aids in Teaching MISTAKES IN TEACHING. By James L. Hughes. Probably the widest read and most valuable book to the average teacher of any published. In a plain, sensible, direct manner, the author notes the chief faults in school management, in discipline, in method, in moral training, and tells how to avoid them. 112 pages. Cloth. Price 40 cents. * Psychologic method nr teaching. By wiiuam a. McKeever, M. A., Ph. M. Furnishes a fresh, vital treatment of the general sub- ject of teaching and trp;-^-' --*-— parts' the first ! methods of hr moral instru of three Price, $1, PSYCHO ’(?• preht livin THS of SI worh as m Tim and is tht 208 page. % % % / LOANED TO National Committee Y. M. C. A. LIBRARY BY _ ^ ^ Tt % i % i i i the to rds ,oth. ver, K)m- ^day ook [)om k on lew this ful. TEAC:^BS’ MANUALS. A series of monographs on teaching and education, of great value to the ambitious, enthusiastic teacher. The Art of Questioning— Fitch. The Art of Securing Atten¬ tion— Fitch. How to Keep Order — Hughes, How TO Conduct the Eecita- How TO Teach Composition Writ¬ ing — Kellogg, My Pedagogic Creed {Dewey') and The Demands of Sociology Upon Pedagogy (Small), tion —M cMuTry. Paper. Price, each, 15 cents; the six for 75 cents, A, FLANAGAN COMPANY - CHICAGO My Pedagogic Creed BY PROFESSOR JOHN DEWEY AND The Demands of Sociology Upon Pedagogy BY PROFESSOR ALBION W. SMALL A. FLANAGAN COMPANY CHICAGO Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https://archive.org/details/mypedagogiccreedOOdewe , PREFACE. The isolation of the teacher is a thing of the past. The processes of education have come to be recognized as fundamental and vital in any attempt to improve human ■ conditions and elevate society. The missionary and social reformer have long been looking to education for counsel and aid in their most difficult undertakings. They have viewed with interest and pleasure the broadening of pedagogy so as to make it include not only experimental physiology and child- study, but the problems of motor training, physical cul- . ture, hygiene, and the treatment of defectives and delin- •quents of every class. The schoolmaster, always conservative, has not found it easy to enter this large field; for he has often failed to V realize how rich and fruitful the result of such researches are; but remarkable progress has been made, and a •changed attitude on the part of educators is the result. ^And how could it be otherwise when the oldest and most n renowned institutions of learning in the land are giving a conspicuous place to the newer and better pedagogy in ^heir curriculum? Another, and perhaps the latest, phase of the educa¬ tional movement is the conviction that the school is a social institution, that its aims are social, and that its management, discipline, and method of instruction should 3 4 Preface. be dominated by this idea. The mere contemplation of the proposition must be accompanied in the mind of every candid person by a sense of our shortcomings in this respect. The two articles presented herewith seem to set forth this subject in such terms and to give it such illumination as to make them worthy of wide circulation, not only among the teachers, but the parents of the land. Dr. Dewey’s Pedagogical Creed shows how the concen¬ trated agencies of the school should bring the child to share in the inherited resources of the race. It points out how discipline and method should be influenced to this end. The article by Dr. Small is a trenchant exposition of the principle that education should direct its attention to sociology, and learn what the work of reality demands of the teacher. It is a fresher and better statement than has yet appeared of the old dictum that education should fit the child for his environment. These two articles constitute an excellent text-book in pedagogy for advanced teachers, and, if conscientiously studied, our schools will come to be “not merely leaders of children, but makers of society.” Samuel T. Dutton, Supt. of Schools. Brookline, Mass. MY PEDAGOGIC CREED. By Professor John Dewey. ARTICLE I. WHAT EDUCATION IS. I BELIEVE that all education proceeds by the participa¬ tion of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual’s powers, satu¬ rating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. Pie becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process.. It can only organize it; or differentiate it in some particular direction. I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in' which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member,of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the stand¬ point of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child’s instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language, and thus the child is introduced 5 6 My Pedagogic Creed. into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language. 1 believe that this educational process has two sides— one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psycho¬ logical is the basis. The child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting-point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education be¬ comes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, in¬ deed, give certain external results, but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psycholog'cal structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child’s activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or dis- integrat’on, or arrest of the child nature. I believe that knowledge of social conditions, of the pres¬ ent state of civilization, is necessary to properly interpret the child’s powers. The child has his own instincts and tenden¬ cies, but we do not knew what these mean until we can trans¬ late them into their social equivalents. We must be able to carry them back into a social past and see them as the inheri¬ tance of previous race activities. W-e must also be able to project them into the future to see what theit* outcome and end will be. In the illustration just used, it is the ability to see in the child’s babblings the promise and potency of a future social intercourse and conversation which enables one to deal in the proper way with that instinct. I believe that the psychological and social sides are or¬ ganically related, and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one My Pedagogic Creed. 7 upon the other. We are told that the psychological defini¬ tion of education is barren and formal—that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us any idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the social defini¬ tion of education, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes of it a forced and external process, and results in subordi¬ nating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status. I believe each of these objections is true when urged against one side isolated from the other. In order to know what a power really is we must know what its end, use, or function is; and this we cannot know save as we conceive of the individual as active in social relationships. But, on the other hand, the only possible adjustment which we can give to the child under existing conditions, is that which arises through putting him'dn complete possession of all his powers. With the'advent of democracy and modern in¬ dustrial conditions, i\ is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of con¬ ditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so’ to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the condi¬ tions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impos¬ sible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant re¬ gard is had to the individual’s own powers, tastes, and in¬ terests—‘Say, that is as education is continually converted into psychological terms. In sum, I believe that the individual who is to be edu¬ cated is a social individual, and that society is an organic.', union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from 8 My Pedagogic Creed. the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we elimi¬ nate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, in¬ terests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, in¬ terests, and habits must be continually interpreted—we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents—into terms of what they are capable of hi the way of social service. ARTICLE 11. WHAT THE SCHOOL IS. I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencie's are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. I believe that the school must represent present life—life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground. I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, forms that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality, and tends to cramp and to deaden. I believe that the school, as an institution, should sim¬ plify existing social life; should reduce it, as it were, to an embryonic form. Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with il: without either con¬ fusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by the mul¬ tiplicity of activities which are going on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction, or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his powers are prematurely called My Pedagogic Creed. 9 into play and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated. I believe that, as such simplified social life, the school life should grow gradually out of the home life; that it should take up and continue the activities with which the child is already familiar in the home. I believe that it should exhibit these activities to the child, and reproduce them in such ways that the child will gradually learn the meaning of them, and be capable of playing his own part in relation to them. I believe that this is a psychological necessity, because it is the only way of securing continuity in the child’s growth, the only way of giving a background of past experience to the new ideas given in school. I believe it is also a social necessity because the home is the form of social life in which the child has been nur¬ tured and in connection with which he has had his moral training. It is the business of the school to deepen and ex¬ tend his sense of the values bound up in his home life. I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere prepa¬ rations. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative. I believe that the moral education centers upon this con¬ ception of the school as a mode of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought. The present educational sys¬ tems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it 10 yfy Pedagogic Creed. difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training. I believe that the child should be stimulated and con¬ trolled in his work through the life of the community. I believe that under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher, because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life. I believe that the teacher’s place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form cer¬ tain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences. I believe that the discipline of the school should proceed from the life of the school as a whole and not directly from the teacher. I believe that the teacher’s business is simply to determine, on the basis of larger experience and riper wisdom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child. I believe that all questions of the ,grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child’s fitness for social life and reveal the place in which he can be of the most service and where he can receive the most help. ARTICLE III. THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF EDUCATION. I believe that the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the back¬ ground of all his efforts and of all his attainments. I believe that the subject-matter of the school curriculum should mark a gradual differentiation out of the primitive unconscious unity of social life. I believe that we violate the child’s nature and render My Pedagogic Creed. 11 difficult the best ethical results by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life. I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor his¬ tory, nor geography, but the child’s own social activities. I believe that education cannot be unified in the study of science, or so-called nature study, because apart from human activity, nature itself is not a unity; nature in itself is a number of diverse objects in space and time, and to attempt to make it the center of work by itself is to introduce a principle of radiation rather than one of concentration. I believe that literature is the reflex expression and inter¬ pretation of social experience; that hence it must follow upon and not preclude such experience. It, therefore, can¬ not be made the basis, although it may be made the summary of unification. I believe once more that history is of educative value in so far as it presents phases of social life and growth. It must be controlled by reference to social life. When taken simply as history it is thrown into the distant past and becomes dead and inert. Taken as the record of man’s social life and progress it becomes full of meaning. I be¬ lieve, however, that it cannot be so taken excepting as the child is also introduced directly into social life. I believe that the primary basis of education is in the child’s powers at work along the same general constructive lines as those which have brought civilization into being. I believe that the only way to make the child conscious of his social heritage is to enable him to perform those.funda¬ mental types of activity which make civilization what it is. I believe, therefore, in the so-called expressive or con¬ structive activities as the center of correlation. I believe that this gives the standard for the place of cooking, sewing, manual training, etc., in the school. 12 My Pedagogic Creed. I believe that they are not special studies which are to be introduced over and above a lot of others in the way of relaxation or relief, or as additional accomplishments. I believe rather that they represent, as types, fundamental forms of social activity; and that it is possible and de¬ sirable that the child’s introduction into the more formal subjects of the curriculum be through the medium of these activities. I believe that the study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is. I believe that one of the greatest difficulties in the present teaching of science is that the material is presented in purely objective form, or is treated as a new peculiar kind of experience which the child can add to that which he has already had. In reality, science is of value because it gives the ability to interpret and control the experience al¬ ready had. It should be introduced, not as so much new subject-matter, but as showing the factors already involved in previous experience and as furnishing tools by which that experience can be more easily and effectively regulated. I believe that at present we lose much of the value of literature and language studies because of our elimination of the social element. Language is almost always treated in the books of pedagogy simply as the expression of thought. It is true that language is a logical instrument, but it is fundamentally and primarily a social instrument. Lan¬ guage is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting indi¬ vidual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end. I believe that there is, therefore, no succession of studies in the ideal school curriculum. If education is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect; an aspect of art My Pedagogic Creed. 13 and culture and an aspect of communication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science, may be introduced. The progress is not in the succession of studies, but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience. I believe, finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing. I believe that to set up any end outside of education, as furnishing its goal and standard, is to deprive the educational process of much of its meaning, and tends to make us rely upon false and external stimuli in dealing with the child. ARTICLE IV. THE NATURE OF METHOD. I believe that the question of method is ultimately re¬ ducible to the question of the order of development of the child’s powers and interests. The law for presenting and treating material is the law implicit within the child’s own nature. Because this is so I believe the following state¬ ments are of supreme importance as determining the spirit in which education is carried on: 1. I believe that the active side precedes .the passive in the development of the child-nature; that expression comes before conscious impression; that the muscular development precedes the sensory; that movements come before conscious sensations; I believe that consciousness is essentially motor or impulsive; that conscious states tend to project them¬ selves in action. I believe that the neglect of this principle is the cause of a large part of the waste of time and strength in school work. The child is thrown into a passive, receptive, or absorbing attitude. The conditions are such that he is not permitted to follow the law of his nature; the result is fric¬ tion and waste. u My Pedagogic Creed. I believe that ideas (intellectual and rational processes), also result from action and devolve for the sake of the better control of action. What we term reason is primarily the law of orderly or effective action. To attempt to de¬ velop the reasoning powers, the powers of judgment, with¬ out reference to the selection and arrangement of means in action, is the fundamental fallacy in our present methods of dealing with this matter. As a result we present the child with arbitrary symbols. Symbols are a necessity in mental development, but they have their place as tools for econo¬ mizing effort; presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without. 2. I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject pre¬ sented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it. I believe that if nine-tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things were spent in seeing to it that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely fa¬ cilitated. I believe that much of the time and attention now given to the preparation and presentation of lessons might be more wisely and profitably expended in training the child’s power of imagery and in seeing to it that he was continually forming definite, vivid, and growing images of the various subjects with which he comes in contact m his experience. 3. I believe that interests are the signs of growing power. I believe that they represent dawning capacities. Accord¬ ingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost.importance for the educator. I believe that these interests are to be observed as show¬ ing the state of development which the child has reached. I believe that they prophesy the stage upon which he is about to enter. My Pedagogic Creed. 15 I believe that only through the continual and sympathetic observation of childhood’s interests can the adult enter into the child’s life and see what it is ready for, and upon what material it could work most readily and fruitfully. I believe that these interests are neither to be humored nor repressed. To repress interest is to substitute the adult for the child, and so to weaken intellectual curiositv and alertness, to suppress initiative, and to deaden interest. To humor the interests is to substitute the transient for the per¬ manent. The interest is always a sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power. To humor the interest is to fail to penetrate below the surface, and its sure result is to substitute caprice and whim for genuine interest. 4. I believe that the emotions are the reflex of actions. I believe that to endeavor to stimulate or arouse the emo¬ tions apart from their corresponding activities is to intro¬ duce an unhealthy and morbid state of mind. I believe that if we can only secure right habits of action and thought, with reference to the good, the true, and the beautiful, the emotions will for the most part take care of themselves. I believe that next to deadness and dullness, formalism and routine, our education is threatened with no greater evil than sentimentalism. I believe that this sentimentalism is the necessary result of the attempt to divorce feeling from action. ARTICLE V. THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. \ I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile. 16 My Pedagogic Creed. I believe that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the ad¬ justment of individual activity on the basis of this social con¬ sciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction. I believe that this conception has due regard for both the individualistic and socialistic ideals. It is duly indi¬ vidual because it recognizes the formation of a certain char¬ acter as the only genuine basis of right living. It is social¬ istic because it recognizes that this right character is not to be formed by merely individual precept, example, or ex¬ hortation, but rather by the influence of a certain form of institutional or community life upon the individual, and that the social organism through the school, as its organ, may determine ethical results. I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconcilia¬ tion of the individualistic and the institutional ideals. I believe that the community’s duty to education is, there¬ fore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own pur¬ poses, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move, I believe that when society once recognizes the possibili¬ ties in this direction, and the obligations,which these possi¬ bilities impose, it is impossible to conceive of the resources of time, attention, and money which will be put at the dis¬ posal of the educator. I believe it is the business of every one interested in edu¬ cation to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator- with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task. ^l/v Pedagogic Creed. 17 I believe that education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience. I believe that the art of thus giving shape to human powers and adapting them to social service is the supreme art; one calling into its service the best of artists; that no insight, tact, executive power is too great for such service. I believe that with the growth of psychological service, giving added insight into individual structure and laws of growth; and with growth of social science, adding to our knowledge of the right organization of individuals, all sci¬ entific resources can be utilized for purposes of education. I believe that when science and art thus join hands the most commanding motive for human action will be reached; the most genuine springs of human conduct aroused, and the best service that human nature is capable of guaranteed. I believe, finally, that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the ^ proper social life. I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. • I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God. DEMANDS OF SOCIOLOGY UPON PEDAGOGY. By Professor Albion W. Small, Ph. D., University of Chicago. At the risk of seeming to reopen a closed incident of ancient history, this paper will take its departure from some passages in the report of the Committee of Ten. The pres¬ ent aim is to define a point of view quite different from that of the committee. In emphasizing the ends to be gained in education, rather than the means to be employed, the writer wishes to be understood as having in mind the whole school career. It is impossible within the limits of this paper to discuss laws or principles of variation which from this point of view should adapt methods to the learner’s needs at dif¬ ferent stages of mental growth. “The principal end of all education,” says the Conference on History, Civil Government, and Political Economy, “is training” (p. 168). The sociologist develops this noncommittal response of the oracle into the following: The end of all education is, first, completion of the individual; second, implied in the first, adaptation of the individual to such co-operation with the society in which his lot is cast that he works at his best with the society in perfecting its own type, and conse¬ quently in creating conditions favorable to the development of a more perfect type of individual. The Committee of Ten seems to have stopped at con¬ clusions which tacitly assume that psychical processes in the individual are ends unto themselves. To be sure, there are signs of a vague looking, for of judgment from the tribunal of larger life upon the products of this pedagogy; but the standards of a real test seem to have had little effect 18 ^ Demands of Sociology and Pedagogy. 19 I upon the committee’s point of view. We are told (p. 168) |i that the mind is chiefly developed in three ways: (a) by cul- i tivating the powers of discriminating observation; (b) by ! strengthening the logical faculty . . (c) by improving I the processes of comparison, i. e., the judgment. We are further told that “studies in language and the natural sci¬ ences are best adapted to cultivate the habits of observa¬ tion ; mathematics, for the training of the reasoning facul¬ ties ; history and allied branches, to promote the mental power which we call the judgment.” The naively medi¬ aeval psychology behind all this would be humorous if it were not tragical. I need not label the pedagogic philosophy j with which my sociology allies itself when I declare that * sociology, in common with the most intelligent pedagogy of to-day, refuses to classify educational material along these lines. In the first place, education is not an affair of per- I ception, reflection, and judgment alone. Education con¬ notes the evolution of the whole personality, not merely of intelligence. In the second place, if I am not rhistaken, a consensus is rapidly forming, both in pedagogy and in so¬ ciology, to the effect that action in contact with reality, not artificial selection of abstracted phases of reality, is the nor¬ mal condition of maximum rate and symmetrical form of personal development. Sociology consequently joins with pedagogy in the aim to bring persons, whether in school or out of school, into as direct contact as possible with the con¬ crete conditions in which all the functions of personality must be applied and controlled. In these conditions alone is that balanced action possible which is the desideratum alike of pedagogical and of social culture. Once more the Committee of Ten was content to remain in the dismal shadows of the immemorial misconception that disjecta membra of representative knowledge are the sole available resource for educational development. I do not find among the fundamental concepts of the report any dis- 20 Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. tinct recognition of the coherence of the things with which intelligent pedagogy aims to procure personal adaptation. The report presents a classified catalogue of subjects good for study, but there is no apparent conception of the cosmos of which these subjects are abstracted phases and elements. Nowhere in the report do I find recognition that education, when it is finished, is conscious conformity of individuals to the coherent cosmic reality of which they are parts. Until our pedagogy rests upon a more intelligent cosmic philos¬ ophy, and especially upon a more complete synthesis of social philosophy, we can hardly expect curricula to correspond with the essential conditions to which human action must learn to conform. A graduate of a leading Eastern univer¬ sity, who is now making an impression upon American pedagogy, said recently that when he took his diploma, about ten years ago, history to his mind was a collection of ma¬ terial which he had studied under Professor A.; political economy, another independent body of information which he studied under Professor B.; psychology, another isolated subject which he had studied under Professor C.; and so on through the curriculum. Not until six or seven years after graduation did it dawn upon him that each of these details of representation is an aspect of one reality which the pedagogy of the college had concealed in making the frag¬ ments prominent. The most serious consideration about this pedagogical perversion is not that it limits knowledge alone. It distorts the whole attitude of men towards the world. In¬ stead of introducing men to reality it tricks them into belief that an unorganized procession of pedantic abstractions is reality. The report of the Committee of Ten presents to the sociologist, therefore, this anomaly: It is a whole made up of parts, every one of which may possibly be accepted by sociology; but the totality, as presented by the committee, sociology must peremptorily reject. It is hot on the trail Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. 21 of pedagogical and sociological truth, without actually com¬ ing within sight of the truth. Human personality is not doomed to struggle forever seriatim with a long list of de¬ tached groups of facts in order to get its psychic and social development. The world of experience is one, not many. Pedagogy and sociology are discovering this unity by differ¬ ent processes, and as a consequence of their perception that educational material is essentially one, not many, pedagogy and sociology are bound to combine their demands for a complete change of front in education. The proper edu¬ cator is reality, not conventionalized abstractions from real¬ ity. Hence the demand of the new pedagogy, supported heartily by the new sociology, that schooling, particularly in its earlier stages, shall be changed from an afflictive im¬ position upon life to a rationally concentrated accomplish¬ ment of a portion of life iself. Hence the correlated de¬ mand of the new pedagogy, also seconded by the new sociology, that, so far as conscious effort is made by in¬ structors to supplement the education of action by the educa¬ tion of cognition, the objects of contemplation shall be kept real by being viewed constantly as organic parts of the one reality. They must no longer be made unreal through analytic segregation which leaves them standing apart as in¬ dependent realities. Having thus by negation challenged some of the implicit concessions of the Committee of Ten to the old dogmatic pedagogy, and to presociological concepts of reality, I pass to a positive definition of the outlook of sociology. I believe it to be also in the line of the pedagogy that will prevail. Human experience is concerned with three knowable ele¬ ments: First, man’s material environment, inanimate and animate; second, man himself as an individual, in all his characteristics, from his place in the animal kingdom, through his special physiology, psychology, and technology; third, man’s associations or institutions. Sociology is the 22 Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. systematic attempt to reduce the reactions of these three ele¬ ments—nature, man, institutions—to scientific form and ex¬ pression. The inclusive reality which sociology finds com¬ prehending both the processes and the products of these reactions is society, i. e., individuals in association, within the conditions imposed by the material environment and modified by human achievement. The task set for each individual when he finds himself participant of this reality is to accommodate himself to prevailing conditions in such a manner that he may both accomplish and enjoy a maximum share of the development which his stage in social evolution is empowered to accomplish. This life task of men consequently sets the pedagogical task of teachers. The prime problem of education, as the sociologist views it, is how to promote adaptation of the in¬ dividual to the conditions, natural and artificial, within which individuals live and move and have their being. It would not be in point to discuss here the relative place of action and cognition in progress toward this end. That belongs to pedagogical technology. I assume that both action and cognition are unchallenged means of modern pedagogy. With their proportions, and with the appropriate sequence at different stages of culture, sociology is not directly con¬ cerned. Sociology has no tolerance, however, for the pedantry that persists in carpentering together educational courses out of subjects which are supposed to exercise, first, the perceptive faculty, then the memory, then the language faculty, then the logical faculty, etc., etc., etc. On the con¬ trary, every represented contact of a person with a portion of reality sooner or later calls into exercise every mental power of that person, probably in a more rational order and proportion than can be produced by an artificial process. Our business as teachers is primarily, therefore, not to train particular mental powers, but to select points of contact be¬ tween learning minds and the reality that is to be learned. Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. 23 The mind’s own autonomy will look out for the appro¬ priate series of subjective mental processes. In the second place, our business as teachers is to bring these perceptive contacts of pupils’ minds with points of objective reality into true association with all the remainder of objective reality, i. e., we should help pupils, first, to see things, and second, to see things together as they actually exist in reality. In other words, the demand of sociology upon pedagogy is that it shall stop wet-nursing orphan mental faculties, and find out how to bring persons into touch with what ob¬ jectively is, as it is. The mind itself will do the rest. In pursuance of this demand, sociology necessarily be¬ comes an active partisan upon one of the pedagogical doc¬ trines over which educators are divided, viz.: sociology de¬ nies that the rational center for the concentration of studies is any science or group of sciences. The rational center is the student himself. Personal adaptation to life means the given person’s organization of his contacts with reality. In other words, pedagogy should be the science of assisting youth to organize their contacts with reality; and by this I mean to organize these contacts with reality by both thought and action, and for both thought and action. Relatively the world stands still during the school-age of any person. The pupil himself changes visibly almost every day. The reality with which the pupil can have conscious contact is defined therefore by the pupil’s own powers and opportunities. At each stage, however, himself on the one hand, and nature, men, institutions, on the other hand, are the subject and object of adjustment. A changing self has the task of adaptation to a surrounding frame of things, which daily displays new mysteries and complexities. The teacher’s task is to help the individual understand this en¬ vironment, of which the pupil for a long time seems to him¬ self to be the center. It is the teacher’s business to help the pupil understand this whole environment as it is related to 24 Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. himself. Presently, if the pupil’s perceptions grow more penetrating and comprehensive, his own personal interests cease to seem the pivot on which the world of experience turns. His personality becomes extended, and at the same time his egoism gets balanced with the personal equation of others whose interests appear. The child finds the com¬ plement of his egoism in the family, the school, the group of playmates, the community, and at last, if his education is complete, in society at large. Yet, at each varying diame¬ ter of comprehension, life, of which the child is at first to himself the center and circumference, and later life as a whole, of which to the last the individual is to himself in the final resort the most interesting part—life, either indi¬ vidual or social, is the ever-present reality which summarizes all that men can positively know. This central and inclusive reality varies, in re-presentation, from socially unrelated in¬ dividual life to a conception of individual life enlarged by evolved social consciousness into a function of the more abiding reality. This human career, either as pursued for himself by the socially unconscious individual, or as a mingling of the individual with others associated by force of circumstances in pursuing purposes which none perfectly comprehend,—this life of men alike in nature, within con¬ ditions imposing common limitations upon nature,-—is the whole of man’s range of positive experience and scientific observation. Sociology consequently dem.ands of educators that they shall elaborate available aids, first, to perception by the individual of the relation of part to part in this inclusive reality—the life of men in society; second, that educators shall perfect influences to promote adjustment of individuals to their appropriate functions within this whole. The part of the problem which I have at present in mind is the proper direction and organization of the pupil’s perceptions. So far as the subject-matter of sociology is concerned, every¬ thing knowable and worth knowing is a fact or' a relation Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. 25 helping to make up this complexity which we call society or social life. The important claim of sociology in this connection is that this reality, like poverty, we have always with us. This reality as a connected whole, related to the pupil, is always the natural and rational means of education. A sequence of studies, in the sense that the pupil is to be enjoined from intelligent contact with portions of reality until other portions have had their turn, is a monstrous per¬ version of the conditions of education. All reality, the whole plexus of social life, is continually confronting the pupil. No “subject” abstracted from this actual whole is veracious to the pupil unless he is permitted to see it as a part of the whole. It is a misconstruction of reality to think and accordingly to act as though one kind of knowl¬ edge belongs to one age and another to another. The whole vast mystery of life, in all its processes and conditions, con¬ fronts the child as really as it does the sage. It is the busi¬ ness of the educator to help the child interpret the part by the whole. Education from the beginning should be an ini¬ tiation into science, language, philosophy, art, and political action in the largest sense. When we shall have adopted a thoroughly rational pedagogy, the child will begin to learn everything the moment he begins to learn anything. Am I demanding a pedagogy which presupposes one phi¬ losopher as teacher and another as pupil ? Certainly. Every teacher ought to be a philosopher. Every child already is one till conventionality spoils him. More than that, he is also a scientist, poet, and artist in embryo, and would mature in all these characters if we did not stunt him with our bungling. I would revive Rousseau’s cry, “Return to na¬ ture !” but in a sense which Rousseau never dreamed,— not nature in the burlesque of our ignorant preconceptions, but nature scientifically explored, nature, the universal law of which is to own the sway of rational mind. I am not asserting that grammar, and geometry, and J , 26 Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. geography, and geology, and history, and economics, and psychology, and ethics, as such, should be taught in the nursery. I am asserting that in the cradle the child be¬ gins to be in contact with that nature and society of which all these are phases and products, and reports. Sociology demands for the child, from the cradle to his second child¬ hood, opportunities for such frank contact with life that its various aspects will confide to him their mystery in its real relations with the other elements of life. Sociology de¬ mands of the tutors and governors who lead the child through the formal part of education, that they shall pilot Wilhelm Meister so discretely through his years of appren¬ ticeship that he shall learn his world at the smallest expense and with least cause for regret both to others and to him¬ self. Whether this citizen of the world shall ever learn to construe life in terms of the conventional sciences is an en¬ tirely secondary matter. The main thing is that, from the beginning, he shall learn to know himself and his world truly —so far as he knows at all,—in all essential relations. This involves the learning of such sciences as he does acquire in the character of excerpts from the whole book of knowledge, not as self-sufficient knowledges. I repeat that sociology values subjects of study for rea¬ sons quite different from those traditionally alleged. Phys¬ ical, biological, and social science, wjth the products of human thought deposited in literature, are worthy of study not because they are tonics for various kinds of mental im¬ potence, but because they are, and only in so far as they are, revealers of man himself and of the life of which he is both creator and creature. Without alluding further to other departments of knowl¬ edge, I may apply what I have said to the subject-matter of the social sciences in particular. Sociology demands with equal confidence: first, that for everybody the study of society shall begin with the nursing- Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. 27 bottle, and continue so long as social relations continue; second, that for most people the study of sociology shall never begin at all. If the argument thus far has provoked expectation that I shall recommend the introduction of sociol¬ ogy into the curriculum of the lower schools, as the needed corrective of educational defects, the inference is decidedly at fault. Only exceptional pupils should study sociology earlier than their senior year in college, and probably these few would do better to defer the study till after taking the bachelor’s degree. While sociology proper is not a desirable subject for young pupils, our educational methods will be miserably inadequate to their social function till every teach¬ er, from the kindergarten on, is sufficiently instructed in sociology to put all his teaching in the setting which the sociological view-point affords. This implies, of course, that the function of education must one day be taken so seri¬ ously that only men and women who have more than the bachelor’s preparation will be intrusted with its direction. The study of society which we may reasonably demand in our schools and colleges to-day must and should be chiefly in connection with the subjects physiography, political geog¬ raphy, anthropology, ethnology, history, civics, and econom¬ ics. The sociological demand with reference to these sub¬ jects is that instruction in them shall be rationalized in the same way that the teaching of geography has been reformed during my recollection. I was not the boy who spent his first week in algebra trying to find out the value of x, but my most lasting recollections of the study of geography cluster around some cabalistic representations of the plane of the ecliptic. To this day I am not perfectly clear about the meaning of those ghostly figures which lent weird interest to the earlier pages of the book. They produced in my youthful mind vague conceptions of uncanny gyrations among celes¬ tial bodies, presumed by the author to be the proper medium 28 Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. for introducing youth to a knowledge of the earth’s surface. This is not intelligent correlation of whole and part. It is arbitrary creation of a whole to which the pupil’s experience does not yet correspond. In another view it thrust upon the pupil’s attention a part which he has not differentiated from the whole. I presume that every parent and every teacher who has liberty to use his own judgment now begins the teaching of geography with that spot of terra firnia which is next to the home or the schoolhouse. Whether the plane of the ecliptic ever gets mentioned is a matter of very slight concern. A similar change in the social sciences is well in progress, but it is not yet a prevalent policy. At my gradua¬ tion from college I passed a respectable examination on the •constitution and by-laws of the government at Westminster, but I knew practically nothing, and was never told that it was worth while to know anything, about the government of the town in which the college was located. My knowledge of the British constitution has never yet found any practical application, but for a decade, as citizen and petty office¬ holder in that college community, I was obliged to study and use the town charter and ordinances, which were not worth the notice of my former instructors. Sociology, like char¬ ity, ought to begin at home; but, like charity, it ought not to stay at home. The rational method of observation, recog¬ nizing the real concentration of life around each member of society, explores the concentric circles of social activity from the actual standpoint of the observer. The child should be¬ gin to study economics literally,—the law of the household, —he should learn the civics and ethics and history of the household, in the practice of normal household relations. The economy of politics and ethics and history of the school, and then of the parent’s shop, and then of the neighboring factory, and later of the whole town, are the best educational material that the sociologist can recommend. In other words, the social desideratum is that the developing member of so- Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. 29 ciety shall become analytically and synthetically intelligent about the society to which he belongs. The precision of his social intelligence in general depends upon the exactness of his knowledge of details in the life which he most intimately shares.* Observation of the structure, functions, and forces of life in one’s own community is the normal beginning of true and large social intelligence and action. Even history should be¬ gin with the present, not with the past. Just as Gibbon in¬ terpreted the tactics of the Roman legions by the knowledge he gained in the British militia, so every student of history is prepared to reconstruct the past only as he possesses cor¬ rect and adequate conceptions of the present. Sociological analysis of the anatomy, physiology, and psychology of society furnishes the alphabet to spell out the lessons of history. The only change in school methods which I am .urging is the introduction of this laboratory study of the social facts, processes, and forces nearest at hand, as exhibiting typical social relations in all nations, times, and places. This is not as a substitute for the present subjects in the social sciences, but as a method of approaching present subjects. One more demand is urged by sociology upon pedagogy, viz., that all direct or indirect observations of society shall be organized under at least three great categories; first, *Small and Vincent's ‘ Introduction to the Study of Society” is the first attempt to furnish a laboratory guide for this sort of study. It is not a text-book in sociology, but a pathmaker in methods of observing and arranging societary facts. Varia¬ tions of the method are possible to fit different needs, from the kindergarten to the seminary. The University of Chicago Press has just issued a typical study of the City of Galesburg, upon this plan, an adaptation of the method of Schseffle, by Mr. A. W. Dunn. Such work can neither displace nor be dis¬ placed by another kind of work upon societary material, as represented, for example, by two recent text-books on soci¬ ology, Giddings’ “Principles of Sociology,” and Fairbanks’ “Introduction to Sociology.” 30 Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. interdependence; second, order or co-operation; third, prog¬ ress or continuity.* Unless social information can be con¬ strued in at least these three forms nothing can save it from frivolity and barrenness. The categories are not logically exclusive,—the fault of the things themselves. By the first category, interdependence, I mean the uni¬ versal fact that every act of event in human life has been made possible or necessary by other acts or events connected with other lives both past and present, and that it helps to make or mar the lives of others. Beginning with the family, and extending to the compass of the race, society is a net work of interdependences. One of the discoveries which pupils should be aided to make, in their study of any time or nation or human process, should be that the particular men concerned exemplified the truth “No man liveth unto him self.’’ By the second category, order or co-operation, I mean the machine-like interplay of actors and actions in every minute, social group as well as in large societies. The relation is s- clear that Mother Goose reported it genially, yet 'it is S( obscure that society is daily dissipating its resources because the relation is not understood. From the factory whislh that rouses the workmen at five o’clock to the curfew bell a the close of day, the waking and the working and the rest ing of a town tell the truth of human welfare resting upoi some form of established order. Wherever men have beer associated even in the most temporary society, the measure of stability in their relations has been preserved by an in¬ stitutional order, as real while it lasted as though it were defined by the iron decrees of Medes and Persians. A mode of temporary equilibrium is one of the forms in whicl *I hope it is superfluous to add that the use of these terms or of any verbal substitutes, is not what I am contending for but the arrangement of ideas in conceptual form for whicl philosophers may find above designations convenient. [ Doiunuls of Sociology upon Pedagogy. 31 human association must be thought, if thought truly, whether I in the society of Ivan the Terrible or of Grover the In- ' scrutable. When the learners read of any epoch of the past, , one of the forms in which they must be helped to represent it, if it is to reveal truth to them, must be the reconstructed balance of influence and action in which the lives of that past time preserved their motion, i- The biographical method of teaching history frequently ^violates this canon. Instead of being made to appear as one 1. of the workers among whom the labor of their generation is ' divided, the great man in whom the story of his age is told seems to fill a sphere apart from ordinary men, aflfecting ; their destinies by some undetermined process of long-dis- l; tance induction. it By the third category, progress or continuity, I mean the conception of men and events as always working out new ' individual conditions and social arrangements, the truth, on • the one hand, that “the roots of the present are deep in the past,” on the other hand, that the present cannot escape re- |Sponsibility for the future. When historical acts are recalled j they should always be considered at last in this third aspect. . What motives and impulses led to them ? What conse- I quences and efifects did they set in motion ? This is the sci- i entific attitude of mind toward the past. It is the genuinely j social attitude toward the present and the future. It is the I purely intellectual condition of the co-operative constructive I temper which is the last and best product to be demanded of education. Yet I have known courses in history to be con¬ ducted under the highest institutional sanction, with no dis¬ cernible reference to historical cause and consequence. Search and emphasis were entirely for the facts. Special¬ ization of that sort is falsification. Facts cannot be told truly except in their relations. j Sociology demands of educators, finally, that they shall not rate themselves as leaders of children, but as makers of 1 ^ 32 Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy. society. ’Sociology knows no means for the amelioration or reform of society more radical than those of which teachers hold the leverage. The teacher who realizes his social func¬ tion will not be satisfied with passing children to the next grade. He will read his success only in the record of men and women who go from the school eager to explore wider and deeper these social relations, and zealous to do their part in making a better future. We are the dupes of faulty analysis if we imagine that schools can do much to promote social progress until they are motived by this insight and this temper. i' -— Outline and Question Books AIDS IN UNITED STATES HISTORY. By 0. H. Marsh. Aids and outlines in U. 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