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Reform of NYC Public Schools, 1896

I shall try in this paper to break away from all current practices, traditions, methods, and philosophies, for a brief moment, and ask what education would be if based solely upon a fresh and comprehensive view of the nature and needs of childhood. Hitherto the data for such a construction of the ideal school have been inefficient, and soon they will be too manifold for any one mind to make the attempt; so the moment is opportune. What follows is based almost solely, point by point, upon the study of the stages of child development, and might, perhaps, without presumption be called a first attempt to formulate a practical program of this great movement. In my limited space I can do little more than barely state the conclusions that affect the practical work of teachers.

The school I shall describe exists nowhere, but its methods, unless I err, are valid everywhere. Altho many of its features exist already, and could be pieced together in a mosaic from many lands and ages, it is essentially the school invisible, not made with hands. But, as there is nothing so practical as the truly ideal, altho my school today exists nowhere, it might be organized anywhere tomorrow; and I hope that the most and the least conservative will agree that it is the true goal of all endeavor, and will not differ except as to whether it may be realized at once or only at the end of a long period of labor. I confess that something like this has from the first animated all my own feeble educational endeavors, and that without it I should be without hope and without goal in the world of pedagogy.

Beginning within the deep philosophy often imbedded in words, "school,"or "schole," means leisure, exemption from work, the perpetuation of the primeval paradise created before the struggle for existence began. It stands for the prolongation of human infancy, and the into whit less important prolongation of adolescence. It is sacred to health, growth, and heredity, a pound of which is worth a ton of instruction. The guardians of the young should strive first of all to keep out of nature's way, and to prevent harm, and should merit the proud title of defenders of the happiness and rights of children. They should feel profoundly that childhood, as it comes fresh from the hand of God, is not corrupt, but illustrates the survival of the most consummate thing in the world, they should be convinced that there is nothing else so worthy of love, reverence, and service as the body and soul of the growing child.

Practically, this means that every invasion of this leisure, the provision of a right measure of which is our first duty to youth, has a certain presumption against it, and must justify itself by conclusive reasons. Before we let the pedagog loose upon childhood, not only must each topic in his curriculum give an account of itself, hut his inroads must be justified in the case of each child. We must overcome the fetichism of the alphabet, of the multiplication table, of grammars, of scales, and of bibliolatry, and must reflect that but a few generations ago the ancestors of all of us were illiterate; that the invention of Cadmus seemed the sowing of veritable dragon's teeth in the brain; that Charlemagne and many other great men of the world could not read or write; that scholars have argued that Cornelia, Ophelia, Beatrice, and even the blessed mother of our Lord knew nothing of letters. The knights, the elite leaders of the Middle Ages, deemed writing a mere clerk's trick beneath the attention of all those who scorned to muddle their wits with others' ideas, feeling that their own were good enough for them.

Nay more: there are many who ought not to be educated, and who would be better in mind, body, and morals if they knew no school. What shall it profit a child to gain the world of knowledge and lose his own health? Cramming and over-schooling have impaired many a feeble mind, for which, as the proverb says, nothing is so dangerous as ideas too large for it. We are coming to understand the vanity of mere scholarship and erudition, and to know that even ignorance may be a wholesome poultice for weakly souls; while scribes, sophists, scholastics, and pedants suggest how much of the learning of the past is now seen to be vanity, and how incompetent pedagogs have been as guardians of the sacred things of culture. Thus, while I would abate no whit from the praise of learning and education for all who are fit for them, I would bring discrimination down to the very basis of our educational pyramid.

I. The kindergarten age is from two or three to six or seven. Here, before the ideal school can be inaugurated, we need some work of rescue from the symbolists. Now the body needs most attention, and the soul least. The child needs more mother, and less teacher; more of the educated nurse, and less of the metaphysician. We must largely eliminate, and partly reconstruct, the mother-plays, while transforming and vastly enlarging the repertory of the gifts and occupations. We must develop the ideal nursery, playgrounds, and rooms, where light, air, and water are at their best. The influences of the new hygiene have been felt least here, where they are needed most. The neglect of these basal principles suggests that we have still among us those whose practice implies a belief that any old place is good enough to hatch out beautiful souls, provided only Froebelian orthodoxy of doctrine and method is steadfastly maintained...

The kindergarten should fill more of the day, and should strive to kill time. In the Berlin Institute children sleep at noon in a darkened room, with music, crackers, or even bottles, and thus resist man's enemy, fatigue, and restore paradise for themselves. Part of the cult here should be idleness and the intermediate state of reverie. We shmotild have a good excuse to break into these, and at this age children should be carefully shielded from all suspicion of any symbolic sense. Thus in play, and play only, life is made to seem real. Imitation should have a far larger scope. Children should hear far more English and better, and in the later years the ear should be trained for French or German. Color should never be taught as such. The children of the rich, generally prematurely individualized or over-individualized, especially when they are children, must be disciplined and subordinated; while the children of the poor, usually under-individualized, should be indulged. We should lose no syllable of the precious positive philosophy of Froebel, the deepest of all modern educational thinkers; but we must profoundly reconstruct every practical expression that he attempted of his ideas, and must strive to induce at least a few college-trained men and women to turn their attention to the kindergarten, thus making the training schools feel, what they have hitherto known so little of, the real spirit and influence of modern science. Teachers should study every child, not necessarily by any of the current technical methods. They should learn far more than they can teach, and in place of the shallow manikin child of books they should see, know, and love only the real thing. After this metempsyhosis, the kindergarten should be, and should become, an integral part of every school system.

II. The age of about seven or eight is a transition period of the greatest interest for science. Then most children have less chewing surface by three or four teeth; there is a year or more of increased danger to the heart; the breath is shorter and fatigue easier; lassitude, nervousness, visual disorders, and cough are somewhat more imminent; and the blood is more often impoverished. The brain has practically finished for life its growth in weight and size; and all work and strain must be reduced. Some important corner in its time of development, not yet fully understood, is turned.

III. At eight or nine there begins a new period, which, for nearly four years, to the dawn of puberty, constitutes a unique stage of life, marked off by many important differences from the period which precedes and that which follows it. During these years there is a decreased rate of growth, so that the body relatively rests, but there is a striking increase of vitality, activity, and power to resist disease. Fatigue, too, is now best resisted, and it is amazing to see how much can be endured. The average child now plays more games, and has more daily activity, in proportion to size and weight, than at any other stage. It would seem, as I have proposed elsewhere with ground for the theory, as tho these four years represented, on the recapitulation theory, a long period in some remote age, well above the simian but mainly before the historic, period, when our early forebears were well adjusted to their environment. Before a higher and much more modern story was added to human nature, the young in warmer climates, where most human traits were evolved, became independent of their parents, and broke away to subsist for themselves at an early age. In this age, which will call the juvenile, the individual boy today is a precious key for the construction of a stage in the history of time race otherwise very obscure.

However this may be, child nature suggests very plainly that this period should be mainly devoted to drill, habituation, and mechanism. The age of reason is only dawning, and is not yet much in order; but discipline should be the watchword here. Writing, and even reading, for instance, should be neglected in our system before eight, and previous school work should focus on stories, the study of nature, and education by play and other activities. Now writing and reading should be first taught with stress. Their nascent period is now beginning. If we teach them before, we are apt to make the average child a bad writer for life by precocious overemphasis on the finer muscles. Modern studies show that the zigzag of the eye back and forth along the printed line is as dangerous as is the too early wigwag of the pen. At best the strain laid upon these tiny muscles is dangerous. Too early drill him read-writing is also enormously wasteful, because intensive effort gives facility now in an amazingly short time. Now first the smaller muscles in the average child, so important for mind- and will-training, can bear hard work and much strain. Accuracy, which, when out of its season, is fraught with so many dangers for mind and body, is now in order.

Verbal memory is now at its very best, auscl should be trained far more than it is. We are now educating the automatic bases of both mind and morals, and habits are never so easily formed or made stable. Manual training and games should be extremely diverse, manifold, and thoro. It is the time to break in the human colt, which is by nature, in some sense, the wildest of all wild animals. If the piano or any other musical instrument is to be learned, this is the time for drill, especially on scales and exercises. An instrumentalist's technique is rarely good if its foundations are not laid in this age. Names, even technical ones, come now. Drawing, too, should now come into prominence, beginning in its large and perfectly free form before writing, and only near the end of the period becoming severely methodic and accurate. Art training should not result in intimidation, but first everything should be drawn - battles, fires, shipwrecks, and railroad accidents, with plenty of human figures and action, and no angles, straight lines, or regular curves, which have come very late in the history of the race. This would make drawing, as it should be, a real expression of the child's soul, and the child should copy what he, and not what the adult, sees.

The mother-tongue will be the vehicle of nearly all the work of this period; but it will be on the short circuit from ear to mouth, which existed for unknown eons before reading and writing, and not chiefly on the long circuit and, biologically, very recent brain-path from eye to hand. Teachers praise written work in home and at school - compositions, essays, class work; but all these appeal to new and undeveloped powers of nerve and muscle. It is because we try to establish good English upon these foundations, so precarious at this stage, that we have so much and so just complaint of bad English. We ruin both handwriting and idiomatic speech by precocity. The child should live its a world of sonorous speech. He should hear and talk for hours each day; and then he would lay foundations for terse and correct English, and would keep read-writing, as it should forever be, subordinate to hearing and speaking. He would write as he speaks, and we should escape the abominations of bookish talk. At this stage written work should be required far less than at present.

Further, to secure these ends, we must first lay stress upon correct spelling - which is, after all, of far less importance than we think - and also upon correct, adult Addisonian syntax. Good grammar is too much to expect yet. We must strive first for utterance and expression, which may be homely, if only vigorous and adequate. Hence, much that we call slang has its place, and is really a revival of English in its host formative stage. The prim proprieties we idolize are not yet, but it is the hour of delight in cogency of expression. We do not yet know what slang to teach, or how to teach it, limit we ought to give the best of it an important place. The boy is not totally depraved because he loves the speech of Chimmie Fadden, of Mr. Ade, or of "The Charwoman," because such language is fresh front the mint where all words were made. Our end is the cultivation of expression, which must bring out clearly and strongly what is in the boy's soul. This expression must be of a kind at least no less effective for other boys than for us. A training that gives the power of writing, or even talking, upon any subject or upon none in particular, is had and vicious. Children have no right to write unless it is upon some subject that they know, and upon which they feel strongly. Theme and composition should be strictly confined to the fields of interest, and then expression will find or make a vent for itself. Moreover, we should not teach language, as such, or apart from objects, acts, amid concrete reality-truth. We must burn most of our language books.

At this stage, arithmetic, so greatly overdone in American schools, should be mechanized, with plenty of mental exercises, and later with rules and processes for written work, with only little attempt at explanation. The elements of geometry, especially on the constructive side, and the metric system should come early, and the rudiments of algebra later. This is the stage, too, for beginning one or two foreign languages. These should always first be taught by ear and mouth. The child has a natural desire to express himself in many other vocal forms than the vernacular, for it is the age when all kinds of gibberish, dog Latin, and inventive words culminate. It represents the stage when human speech evolved fastest. If these languages are taught earlier, they jeopardize idiomatic English; if later, they are never pronounced or used with precision, and are not immediate vehicles of thought. Psychology has shown that speech is greatly reinforced by appeals to the eye, not in the form of the written or printed word, but thru pictures, and that even color intensifies the linguistic effect. Many a French or German word that could not otherwise be recalled is reproduced, or first taught more permanently, if the object or picture is shown, or the appropriate action is performed at the same instant. Books should be by no means discarded, but the chief stress should be laid on the oral work and thought. The object should be brought into immediate action without the intervention of the English word.

As to the dead languages, if they are to be taught, Latin should be begun not later than ten or eleven, and Greek never later than twelve or thirteen. Here both object and method are very different. These languages are taught thru English, and the eye-hand circuit should save have much more prominence. Word-matching and translation are the goal. The chief reason why the German boy of fifteen or sixteen in Unter Secunda does so easily here what seems to us prodigious is because he is taught to study; and the teacher's chief business in class is not to hear recitations, but to study with the boys. One of the best of these teachers told me that the boy should sever see a dictionary or even a vocabulary, but the teacher must be a "pony." The pupil should never be brought face to face with an unknown sentence, but everything must be carefully translated for him; he must note all the unknown words from the teacher's lips and all the special grammatical points, so that home study and the first part of the next lesson will be merely repetitions of what the teacher had told and done.

The modern school geography should hue reduced to about one-fourth or even one-eighth of its present volume. It is too often a mosaic of geology, topography, physical geography, botany, zoology, anthropology, meteorology, and astronomy. The facts of each of these sciences, however, are not taught in their natural or logical order; but the associations are mainly those of place and contiguity, not of similarity and cause. Even in these days of correlation of studies the facts of these sciences are separated from their logical connection with each other; and by the use of a more fortuitous local association the reason is injured. Our geographies do not respect the unity of the child's mind. Their facts are connected neither with each other nor with the nascent stages of growth. The interest in primitive man and animals culminates from nine to ten; that in trade and governmental parts of geography comes from sixteen to twenty. The geographies of the last two or three years have mitigated, but by no means healed, these evils; and, as we speak of Turkey as "the sick man of Europe," we may still speak of geography as the sick subject of our curriculum.

Instead of reverencing this relic of mediaevalism, as its history shows it to be, we should greatly reduce the time given to it, and should first teach Heimatskunde; make maps more abundant, but more incidental to every topic, especially history; develop and teach elementary and illustrated anthropology and zoology, broadening to elementary astronomy, geology, meteorology, and botany, taught by and for themselves to bring out their disciplinary value, and so on in ways I have here no space to dwell upon. When we have reduced the enormous time now given in geography, the elements of each of these sciences will be taught in primers - some of which are now begun before the end of this period - which will continue the nature work of the period before seven or eight.

The hand is in a sense never so near the brain as now; knowledge never so strongly tends to become practical; muscular development never so conditions mental. Muscle-training of every kind, from play up to manual work, must now begin. Instead of thee Swedish or other curricularized and exactly finished objects made, we should have a curriculum of toys at first and of rude scientific apparatus later, where everything will focus more upon the ulterior use of the object than upon the process of making it. All these things will be chosen from the field of the child's interests.

Singing will be prominent in the ideal school at this age; but far more time will be given to rote singing than to singing from notes, especially at first. The chief aim will be, not to develop the power to read music, important as the place of this is, but to educate the sentiments, and especially to attune them to love of home, nature, fatherland, and religion - the four chief themes of song in all ages, past and present. Music is the language of the feelings, just as speech is of the intellect. It is as absurd to teach notes to children before they can sing well as it would be to teach them reading before they can speak. The object of musical education in the public school is to express and train the emotions, and, thru these, the will and character; to perform joys and conduct, and not to make musicians.

Reason is still very undeveloped. The child's mind is at a stage when there is little in it that has not been brought in by way of sense. We must open wide the eye-gate and the ear-gate. "Show," "demonstrate," and "envisage" should be our watchwords, not "explain." We can easily make casuists and prigs, but we jeopardize thereby the ultimate vigor of reason. Hence we should explain very little. Even with respect to morals and conduct the chief duty of the child at this age is to obey. In most cases to try to explain brings self-consciousness and conceit. This method is the resource of teachers and parents whose personality is deficient in authoritativeness. Obedience should still be a law, if not a passion. If it is lacking, this is due to imperfect character or perverted methods in adults.

In fine, this is the age for training, with plenty of space and time, however, for spontaneity and voluntary action. The good teacher is a true Pedotrieb, or boy driver. He needs some method, but much more matter. He or she finds relatively little sentiment, but much selfishness, bound up in the hearts of children at this age. One of the chronic errors of too fond mothers and of modern teachers is to overestimate the capacities of children, especially boys, at this age for sympathy with adult feelings or interests. The world we live in is not theirs. We are "Olympians," and can enforce our will because we are stronger. We must be tolerated and respected, and must be treated within all the forms of respect and obedience that we require; but the interest of children at this age is almost exclusively in each other, and in each other's ways, not in adults. This breaks out suddenly, but just later.

Just before this period ends, boys and girls in the ideal school will be chiefly, tho not exclusively, placed under the care of teachers of their own sex. At the close of this period the ideal child, ideally trained, will be first of all helpful and active in body and mind; will read and write well; will know a great deal about the different aspects of nature in his home environment; will not be bookish, but will already know a few dozen well-chosen books; will understand and read simple French and German; and will perhaps have a good start in Latin and Greek. Some buds of specialization will have begun to bourgeon. This child will be able to play several dozen games; will know something of a number of industries...

I have spoken frankly, and have dealt only with general principles over a vast field, far too large to be adequately discussed here. I have carefully avoided all details, altho I have fully worked them out on paper at great length, for each topic to the close of the high-school period or the age of nineteen, when physical growth is essentially completed. This material will soon appear in a volume. The chief petition in my daily prayer now is for a millionaire. With the means at hand, I have no shadow of doubt or fear but that in five years from the date of any adequate gift we shall be able to invite all interested to a system of education, covering this ground, which will be a practical realization of much present prophecy, and which will commend itself even to the most conservative defenders of things as they are and have been, because the best things established will be in it. But it will be essentially pedocentric rather than scholiocentric; it may be a little like the Reformation, which insisted that the sabbath, the Bible, and the church were made for man and not be for them; it will fit both the practices and the results of modern science and psychological study; it will make religion and morals more effective; and, perhaps above all, it will give individuality in the school its full rights as befits a republican form of government, and will contribute something to bring the race to the higher maturity of the superman that is to be, effectiveness in developing which is the highest and final test of art, science, religion, home, state, literature, and every human institution.