A New Movement in Education

I

A TRUTH to which humanity seems ever blind is this — that everything that is born must die; and that institutions, being part of this ephemera, are also subject to the law of change and death, giving place to new and ever-rising forms, which prove more adequate to express the eternally progressive spirit of man.

It is hard to believe this truth, because nothing seems so substantial and lasting as a great institution, established upon ideas and practices that have enlisted the acceptance and faith and activities of countless men and women; moving on beyond human life and death; and receiving anew the devotion of successive generations. It seems to stand immune to change, to be above mortality.

Such is the apparent stability of our great public-school system. Yet at the very meridian of one star’s success, another star is always dawning on the horizon. At the moment of the greatest power and prestige of an established institution, a new and revolutionary institution is rising — so small, so insignificant as to seem unworthy of attention, yet destined perhaps to outrival and eventually displace the old. Might one suspect that the very maturity and perfection of organization of our present school system is a presage of over-ripeness?

Yet, in spite of age, an institution will survive and maintain its prestige so long as it proves satisfactory. It is only in an atmosphere of discontent that revolutions are born. If all parents were contented with the present educational system, no one could, with any confidence, announce a revolutionary change. It is, however, just because of a discontent almost universal on the part of the most cultured and intelligent parents that one may prophesy a revolution, or perhaps an evolution, in our educational ideals and methods. Just what line that evolution may follow is open to discussion. To parents of the class above mentioned, educational malcontents, parents who dare rebel against the long hours of physical, mental, and emotional suppression of their children within the public schools, this article would point the way to the education of the future as conceived by numerous educators and parents of this country — a type of education to which the name ‘progressive’ has been given.¹

This movement has already been evolving for half a generation. As in the case of many inventions and scientific discoveries, different innovators have been independently working out the principles which may now be brought together, and are so being brought together, in successful practice. New schools of this progressive type are springing up in different cities. More and more parents are coming to demand this education for their children. And young and unheralded as this movement is, it is presented to those who are anxious for a change in education as a possible David for their Goliath.

The primary demand of progressive education is more freedom for the child. Thus it is an expression in education of that innate desire which has already so strongly expressed itself in the world of intellect, of government, and of religion, and which is fast invading other fields of human activity. Freedom without license is the right of every man and woman. It is the discovery of the progressive educator that it is the right of every child — a right that can safely be granted.

As the physical is that side of our nature which is most fundamental, and the first in order of development, progressive education believes in giving the child freedom of movement. In a progressive school there are no fixed desks. All the furniture is movable. To form a class, the children draw up their chairs or movable desks around the teacher. In mild weather the class may be bodily transferred out-of-doors, desks and all, with no loss of efficiency; for habit has bred in those accustomed to freedom the ability to exercise it without excitement or waste of time and attention.

Not only are the seats comfortable and easily adjusted to the pupil’s desire, but the child, in most progressive schools, is free to get up and leave the class if it becomes too irksome. Not that this privilege is often used; but it is there — and if a pupil is restless and unable to give attention, the teacher might even suggest that some form of activity, such as work at the carpentry bench or a run out-of-doors, would be advisable.

This physical freedom may seem a slight thing; but the lack of it is irksome to a growing child, and is responsible for many neuroses that the teacher in a formal school is obliged to call misbehavior. Ole Bull, when a schoolboy, sometimes became so physically nervous that he would jump out of the window and run away. Such a situation should be impossible. Schools of the progressive type have been conducted long enough now to prove that the average amount, or even more, of the a b c’s can be acquired in a school of physical freedom, on account of the superior interest and concentration of the children when they are at work. Much of the nervousness of American school-children can be attributed to the brutal (so it will seem a hundred years from now) custom of holding them to fixed seats, — six rows, seven in a row, — for five hours a day. The best public schools, realizing this fault, are now breaking the session up into shorter units by introducing several brief periods of exercise or play into the morning and afternoon sessions, in addition to the customary recess. But such measures are only palliative.

In the Moraine Park School of Dayton, Ohio, one may see a wonderful demonstration of freedom, backed up by efficient work as proved in standard tests. There are no formal classes below the fifth grade. The children drill each other in arithmetic or spelling, reporting to the teacher for an occasional test of their progress. In reading, they choose whatever books they please, and finding a comfortable corner, read to themselves. Often a child will find a book so interesting that he will want to share it with his mates. Then he will gather a few children together, and, with the teacher to help him, will read aloud to the group. In every room is a carpentry bench equipped with tools and materials, to which a child may repair when tired of mental work.

In these elementary grades the utmost freedom prevails. One visiting the school sees children moving softly back and forth to their tasks, or working quietly in small groups. There is an atmosphere of effort, of seriousness, of joy in the school. The architecture and furnishings harmonize with this lovely spirit. It is the most beautiful home of learning I have ever seen.

The Moraine Park School is not the only one of this type. A similar freedom can be found in other progressive schools, such as the Park School, Baltimore; the Edgewood School, Greenwich, Connecticut; the Fairhope School, Alabama; the Oak Lane Country Day School, Philadelphia; the Park School, Buffalo; the Unquowa School, Bridgeport, Connecticut; the Francis W. Parker Schools of Chicago and San Diego; and others, too numerous to mention here.

II

Next to physical freedom comes mental freedom. How far that can profitably go is the mooted question. In some of the progressive schools children below ten years of age have no obligatory studies. There is no formal drillwork. In other progressive schools there is a definite programme paralleling the public-school programme for grade work. But in all progressive schools the aim is to have interest aroused before work is assigned.

The belief is that work done without interest is poorly done. A child can be forced to a simple physical task, and can hardly fail to accomplish something at it in the course of an hour. But the mind is more elusive and not so easily controlled. There is something perversely impish at times about a child’s mind; so finds the disgruntled teacher who sets the child to a mental task, and after an hour, a day, a week, finds nothing accomplished. Perhaps the child-mind is like the house-brownie of our fairy tales, who plays mischievous tricks on those he does not like, but works all night at tasks to help those who are kind to him and who have won his confidence.

Granted that the child-mind can balk, — no educator denies this, — and that punishment will avail no more than beating a balky horse, may not wisdom suggest that the teacher endeavor to discover why the child balks at the given task?

Does it ever occur to the educator that a child has emotions; that emotions are motive-power; that if a child has made up its mind not to learn a thing, no compulsion can avail; and that the best way to get the child to learn a thing is to make it want to learn that thing?

The progressive educator therefore spends much time and attention in analyzing the child’s wants and studying its reactions, seeking to guide and correct its emotional nature as a preliminary to intellectual progress.

Certainly there is little profit in the hours spent over lessons where the pupil’s will is adverse to the task; or in hours spent in class-work where the pupil is uninterested and inattentive. The theory and practice of progressive education, therefore, are based on this simple and well-known psychological truth, that interest and attention are necessary preliminaries to the acquisition of knowledge. Of course this truth has been known to education, and successful teachers have always sought to arouse the interest and attention of their pupils. Therefore, it is not so much in the enunciation of a theory, as in its application, that progressive education is making new departures. The gifted teacher in any system of education succeeds by personal magnetism, combined with intellectual enthusiasm; but if there can be created a method that will make it easier for less gifted and ordinary teachers to hold the interest and attention of their pupils and inspire them to effort, then all education has gained immeasurably.

This is what progressive education seeks to do; and in so doing it makes use of such devices as the following.

1. Competitive games in which there is some opportunity for action. Competition, in studies as in athletics, produces zest. The ‘spelling-bee’ is an old-time example of such competition. A game invented by a progressive educator, called ‘spelling-baseball,’ has much more competitive excitement, however, and is a very excellent supplement of the ‘spelling-bee.’ It is played as follows. Bases are marked off on the floor as in baseball, with more economy of space, however. The class is divided into two teams, each of which has a pitcher. The man at the bat receives the words from the pitcher of the opposing team. A word spelled right counts as a ball, while one spelled incorrectly counts as a strike. Three strikes means out — four balls means first base. ‘Baseball’ can be used also in the teaching of geography, and an ingenious teacher can make still further applications of it.

One can readily see the many advantages of this game. In the first place, it gives a motive for careful study of a review lesson. Not only does each side study hard, but the pitchers, who are also captains, will frequently coach the weak members of their teams. The onus of the drill thus falls entirely on the pupils instead of on the teacher; and the blame for negligence in reviewing the lesson comes swiftly and heavily upon the careless pupils from their own contemporaries. Secondly, it gives amusement and an opportunity for relaxing cramped limbs. Thirdly, and perhaps most important of all, it associates pleasure with the educative process. This and similar games help to make the child’s mental attitude toward education one of eagerness and joy. There is formed a mental appetite and desire, which is as necessary for the assimilation of knowledge as physical appetite and desire is necessary for the proper assimilation of food.

In a similar way, without, however, using the model of baseball, a recitation in spelling, history, or geography, can be run off as a game between opposing teams, the captains of each team throwing the questions at the opposing team, with the teacher as score-keeper and referee.

It is apparent that the success of such games does not depend very much upon the skill of the teacher. It is a method that any teacher who can at all manage children can successfully apply. Numerous other competitive games have been invented, and are constantly being invented, in progressive schools in order to take away the drudgery from drill-work.

2. The abandonment of the formal recitation. By games such as those described above, and by democratizing, or socializing the class-work, the formal recitation is dispensed with as much as possible in progressive schools. Indeed, some schools, such as Miss Parkhurst’s in New York, have entirely abolished the recitation, using instead a system of conferences and lectures originated by Thomas Burke of the San Francisco Normal School.

The formal recitation is a great waste of the pupil’s time and nervous energy. This subject is important enough to deserve a separate article, and cannot be treated further here. Suffice it to say that the progressive educator seeks in different ways to find substitutes for the formal recitation. Games, socialized recitations, individual work, are methods used. Again, instead of assigning work to be finished in a study period and subsequently recited, the teacher can work with the class, combining study and recitation into one process. This can be done to advantage in arithmetic. It is done to great advantage in commercial schools for the teaching of foreign languages, where the pupils are expressly forbidden to study the lessons outside the class.

By decreasing the number of formal recitations, the strain on the teacher is reduced. In the socialized recitation the pupils do all the work, and the teacher may even absent himself, or remain as umpire. In the Moraine Park School, for each history recitation the class has a secretary and president, the pupils serving in rotation. The president conducts the recitation, and the secretary keeps the records, which he reads at the beginning of the next recitation in the form of a review.

The progressive method seeks to shift responsibility as much as possible from the teacher to the pupils. Let the children realize early in the process of education, that it is not for the teacher they are studying, but for themselves. Let the teacher, so far as is possible, be the friendly guide and adviser of the pupils, not their task-master. Surely there is something wrong with a school system from which pupils graduate with the feeling that they are escaping; yet such is the emotion naturally engendered where work is done at the behest of another.

I do not mean to imply by this that pupils can be left to their own devices, or that the teacher should be any less their intellectual and moral leader. Progressive education does not detract from the value of the teacher as the conveyer to the pupil of the race-knowledge acquired in the past, but rather presents a better method of imparting such knowledge.

3. A more flexible programme. In life it is variety and unexpected pleasures which relieve the irksomeness of the steady grind; and in school-life, even a slight variation at times from the set programme is effective in freeing the child’s subconscious mind from unpleasant. routine-associations connected with the school session. To give over the formal work at times, in order to prepare a drama or to carry out a project of an educational nature, pleases children immensely, and serves to keep up their interest in the school-work as a whole.

Some progressive schools go even further, and depart widely from a fixed programme, especially in the younger grades. The amount of book-knowledge which it is necessary to absorb before the age of ten is so slight that it can easily be got in much less time than the public-school system gives to it, provided interest and attention are continually active. Dr. Colin Scott has proved this in the experimental schools connected with Mt. Holyoke College. His results in abridging the grade-work, by means of constant interest and mutual help among the pupils, are amazing. Therefore, it stands to reason that a progressive school, if it prefers to enrich the curriculum rather than abridge the time for acquiring the standard amount of subject-matter, can afford to leave a great deal to the initiative of the child, provided that interest and desire are constantly functioning.

This method has already been described in connection with the Moraine Park School, where there is no formal programme up to the fifth grade. Such flexibility in the programme is of course made possible only by reason of a great deal of individual work, or of drillwork carried on between pairs of students. To safeguard against a onesided and indulgent mental appetite, the teacher keeps some kind of record of the work done by the students each day; and if any subject is neglected for three or four days, the teacher urges that it be given attention.

In the Parkhurst School already spoken of, and in the Dalton (Massachusetts) High School, programme recitations have been abolished. The teachers post each week the work to be done for that week in the different subjects, and the pupils are free to accomplish these tasks according to their own desires. For instance, a student may wish to spend Monday on history, and get the whole week’s work out of the way that day. He is the maker of his programme — submitting only to the larger fixed programme of weekly work. Once or twice a week each teacher meets the whole class in conference and reviews the week’s work, thus supplementing the pupil’s individual efforts. At other times the teachers are available for individual help.

4. Correlation of book-knowledge with the daily life of the child. This principle needs little explanation. It is not peculiar to progressive schools. All successful educators use it. Geographical magazines, news weeklies, lantern-slides, picture post-cards, railroad folders, manufactured products, excursions to museums and institutions and factories— all these aids are used more or less wherever teachers hold forth. It is rather in degree of use that progressive schools differ from other schools. The endeavor in progressive schools is, in so far as is possible, to connect all subject-matter with daily life, and to omit from textbooks that knowledge which is irrelevant or petty.

It remained for a Persian philosopher of the past century to lay down most clearly the principle that should guide all educators in forming their curriculum. ‘Do not teach,’ he said, ‘those subjects that begin and end in words; but only those that pertain to human welfare.’ Without seeking to pass judgment upon the present standard curriculum, the writer would state that, in his educational experience, those subjects which begin in words and end in words have never failed to bore the pupil; whereas there is an immediate and sustained appeal in all that pertains to human welfare. Not, perhaps, because of altruistic, but rather because of egoistic, motives, does the child of any age react emotionally to every fact which seems to bear, even remotely, upon his happiness or his mode of living. In the course of such studies there is an awareness of being that gives a comfortable thrill wholly lacking in the bookworm process. We like to feel that there is also a spark of altruism in every human breast, and that it responds to the inspiration of human achievement and to the appeal of human needs.

III

What have been described so far arE methods by which the progressive educator seeks to enliven the process of knowledge-acquisition and to adapt it more closely to the child’s needs and legitimate desires, with the purpose of keeping always in the child a joyous attitude toward study. But this is only a part of the progressive programme. As the child has other sides to his nature than the purely intellectual, so a system of education which would aim to be complete must offer an all-round development, including the physical, emotional, æsthetic, and social.

This is rather an ambitious programme; and since progressive education has not been established long enough adequately to check up results in these directions; since, also, these aims are not specific to progressive education, but are more or less claimed by all educators, it will be best to speak here briefly of a few particular methods used in progressive schools to obtain these larger results.

The physical development of the child is considered by Marietta L. Johnson, one of the pioneers of progressive education, to take precedence over the intellectual development up to the age of ten. In all progressive schools the freedom of movement already described, the use of games and rhythmic expression and manual work, and exercise in gymnasium or on the playground, provide amply for the normal, healthy development of the child’s body.

Progressive education pays much more attention to the emotions than does ordinary education, both in watching carefully the emotional reaction of the child to its school-work, and in providing emotional outlet and emotional training by use of competitive games in place of the formal recitation, by story-telling, rhythmic expression, and dramatization. Instead of assigning the parts in a play to those children naturally possessed of dramatic ability, the progressive educator seeks in the course of the year to give all the children an opportunity to act, and through acting to find emotional expression and a cure for self-consciousness and shyness.

The æsthetic qualities are developed, not only by the ordinary use of music and art, but also by craft-work, which holds a large place in a progressive curriculum and furnishes the most popular hour of the day with the children. In the acting of dramas and pageants, also, the æsthetic sense is developed.

In the Moraine Park Junior School, Dayton, Ohio, the architecture, the system of interior decoration in cool grays, the use of willow furniture with chintz cushions, and the total equipment and furnishings of the school, are calculated to make the same impression upon the children that they would receive from their own homes of culture. This is the only school plant I have ever seen which equals in æsthetic appeal the home environment of the child of cultured people. It is an innovation in school plants, calling for a larger investment per capita than most schools can win from the paying public; but it seems the logical thing. Why should our children be forced to step down several, or many, degrees in cultural environment when they leave their homes for their schools?

To the social development of the child the progressive educator pays great attention. By some system of self-government the child is given an opportunity for self-control, which makes his actions more and more studied to please the social group. Under such a system his selfishness or disobedience would offend, not a teacherautocrat, but the group of children, his peers, who have made the rules he is disobeying and who are prompt to register their disapproval. So that the prankish child cannot pose as a hero before his mates by breaking rules, but discovers very soon that by such actions he becomes obnoxious to his social group. From this discovery comes a reform, and a training such as adults receive at the hands of their fellows. For few people, adults or children, can long hold out against the disapproval of their social group.

Not only by means of self-government, but in socialized recitations, in games, in dramatic work, in student projects, and in work and responsibilities, which the pupils so gladly share for the sake of their school (at Dayton, the pupils, among them sons of millionaires, do most of the janitor work), the children of a progressive school find opportunity for social and character development.

IV

Every movement has three stages. First, people say, ‘There is nothing to it.’ Then they say, ‘It cannot succeed.’ Finally, its successful establishment leads people to remark, ‘I always believed in it.’

The progressive movement has already passed the first stage, and has reached the point where the chief criticism brought against it is, ‘ It could never succeed in the public school.’ The reason given is that it would be unfeasible in classes of forty and fifty. Progressive educators admit this difficulty; but does the fault lie with progressive education, or with a system which puts fifty children in one classroom under a tired teacher?

‘But,’ say the opponents, ‘smaller classes would be more expensive, and the public is not willing to pay more for its educational budget.’

‘That is just the point,’ retort the proponents. ‘The public must become enlightened enough to see that the amount of money they appropriate now buys only quantity education; and they must be converted to the idea that it is worth while to pay more and get quality, or real, education for their children.’

So the campaign is on, and the public is being appealed to. Meanwhile, private day schools in many cities of the country are blazing new trails and demonstrating in a concrete way the value of progressive education. In many public schools these methods are being carried out, in spite of the handicap of large classes. Hard-headed business men are becoming proselytes, through experience with their own children. When enough practical laymen become converted to progressive education, they can put it over the top in our public schools, which are ultimately only an expression of the will of the people.

That the progressive movement is open to criticism, no one could intelligently deny. It is still young, still unformed, still empirical. It may on occasions go to extremes in its reaction against the formalism of the present system. But it is a heathily growing movement, the defects of which time and experience will eradicate. It is not as yet standardized. Therein lies its power and its appeal. It is a movement still open to change, ready and eager for intelligent criticism and aid. It is a movement for you and for me; and its ultimate will be what you and I conspire to make it.