V.11 1893-94

GAZ OF THE

JUN 13 1932

But talk is cheap, and not often very influential. When teachers remove their shoes and stand "with their hats in their hands and their chins on their chests, in the august presence of the lawmakers," and when even superintendents and supervisors of instruction candidly admit that after each election they immediately set about seeing where the votes are coming from to elect them the next year, we wonder not that so many teachers lose the professional spirit, or that so many men, educated, able and self-respecting, prefer professional work in the colleges, or in other channels, to the public school service. But it ought not to be so.

Our Chart.

The attention of the reader is called to our supplement, LAND BIRDS. We believe it will be found a valuable help to the teacher, furnishing her with many suggestive lessons. It is astonishing how few birds even country children are able to distinguish and call by name. It ought not to be. A good part of the instruction in the country school should be drawn from Nature-the fields, woods, air. This is the means by which the child should be trained during the first eight or ten years of its school-life. The country makes a great mistake when it allows the superficial standards of the town to control its courses of study. This little sheet, executed especially for us, and companions which We

389 14-8

Number I

shall give the reader from time to time, will furnish many interesting lessons to the children. We would suggest that it be glued to good, firm paste-board and hung upon the walls of the schoolroom. It will thereby not only serve the teacher in her instruction, but will influence the intelligent pupils to get acquainted with the real songsters of the groves and woodlands.

Puerile.

The doings of the World's Educational Congress, recorded in one or two of our weekly journals, are not worth the paper they are printed on. These reports are merely skeleton, and yet not enough so to determine their place in the kingdom of bones educational. Think of this abstract from Dr. Packard's address: "He said the sch ol curriculum was not an end but a means to the formation of mind. The pupil's body and habits should be attended to as well as his mind. Character was to be formed, morals to be shaped and cared for. There should be the influence of example. Locke's principle, 'A sound mind in a sound body,' should not be forgotten." Or this account of the discussion on school supervision:—“In the school supervision department, Supt. F. A. Fitzpatrick, of Omaha, opened the discussion on "How to Improve the Work of Poor Teachers." Discussions of kindred topics followed."

It seems to us almost an imposition to ask intelligent men and women to read such dull, meaningless, inane accounts of the discussion of great questions—and that, too, in a sheet devoted, or supposed to be, to the interests of education.

Hard times! Yes, but with our shoulders to the wheel and a large and increasing family around our fireside, we propose, Deo volente, to keep our standard "still high, advanced," and our table spread with a richer and even more bounteous supply. Of course, we are conscious of the fact that not resolve alone, nor merely "waiting upon Providence," will enable us to do this. It will require what everybody has been talking about these past few weeks silver and gold. For, alas, we are mortal, and the gods refuse to aid us unless we propitiate them with silvern speech and golden nectar. That supply must come from our numerous readers. Like the rest of the business world we have to keep an eye to the future, and be ready for the emergencies that may come to us at any moment in times like these. But we do not wish to retrench or give our readers less than they have been receiving. That is not our business way. Our motto is, more and more for every dollar. But we must have the dollars. That surely is essential. In this issue we send out many reminders of small sums due us. Small, very small, they are when divided; but they aggregate a considerable sum. A mite to the individual subscriber, but hundreds of dollars to us, which received will push to success improvements already contemplated. This is the logic of the prompt payment of the sums due us. Shall we not have them before the fall sets in? With the appreciation in which the POPULAR EDUCATOR is held, and intelligence and a generous heart in the subscriber, we believe that we need but to remind.

On the Brain.

-

Horace Mann and "those thirty-one Boston masters who opposed him, still troubles, as with a night-mare, Col. Parker's sleep; or, if not his sleep, certainly his brain. Here, in a recent issue of the New York School Journal, we find him asserting that no one has "yet dared to write a faithful biography" of the great educator because, forsooth, "it would be a revelation to the Boston school, of school keeping, of men who are now living, living men who have unconsciously become adherents of the theories presented by the thirty-one masters who opposed Horace Mann"; which, interpreted, means that his biography written by the wife, a noble and cultured woman, (the biography of a "noble hero", it is true, but not a hero because he discussed pedagogical questions with "thirty-one" Boston masters) was written, with fear tugging at the intellect, fear of men now living" (although the biography was written nearly thirty years ago) and, in consequence, cowardly in its conception and untrue. Surely, we are inclined to exclaim with the domine of old, "Prodigious!" And then to be told further that the "Boston school has made itself notorious by its strong opposition to the study of all principles and methods, and that this "opposition to progress" "gave it a dominating influence all over America" - that is too much for our intellectual gravity. Surely, if the first assertion be true, how monstrous that Maun's biographer, wife and noble woman, should write of him, "He abode ever in the palace of Truth"; and if the latter be not nonsense, then indeed do we all live in a Paradise of Fools.

66

Another Tyrant.

Prof. Hart, of Harvard University, said the other day that the great fault of our city schools is too much uniformity and too little development of the individual, either of teacher or of pupil. He might have added truthfully that graded schools and written examinations were cotemporaneous with this too much uniformity. Written examinations as the absolute tests of promotions are fast passing out of fashion, and now it is time that the tyranny of the graded system be dealt a few stalwart blows. In that attack the POPULAR EDUCATOR will be first and foremost. Grading, of course, there must be, but better no, grading than one that kicks against Nature and maims the growing child. Every mind has its own base, is peculiar, feeds, this on meat, that on vegetables; this loves physics, that metaphysics; this, like the swallow, skims the air, that, like the quadruped, has a stomach and prefers the earth. Richter cared nothing for history or geography; history he called an affair of memory, a sapless, heartless thistle for pedantic chaffinches, (and such surely it often is). Gibbon could not understand a simple proposition in Euclid. One would think that music and oratory would go together, but the ears of a great orator are musically dull. Charles Sumner mixed in inextricable confusion physics and mathematics. Emerson was extremely dull at figures, and was not troubled that his children took after' him. author of the "Evolution of Dodd ", in an article in the Public School Journal, gives in his bright, attractive way, these illustrations: “I found a lady friend of mine who is one of the most brilliant women, in a literary way, that I over met - a woman who fills me with wonder and amazement at the range and quality of her literary acquirements, who can repeat pages and pages from the be-t authors of this and other times, and whose criticisms of literature are oracles among all who know her; and yet she cannot make change for a dollar! She could not tell you how much eleven and one-half yards of calico would cost at nine and threefourths cents a yard! She cannot repeat the multiplication table! She cannot add a simple column of figures! She never could, or did, carry arithmetic at school, and as for the higher mathematics, she has no more comprehension of their purport, than has the man in the moon. And yet she went to school, as a girl, and tried her

The

best to learn numbers. short on that line.

She could not do it. She was born

But I beg you to note that she is not a fool.

On the contrary, as I have already said, she is one of the most intelligent and cultured women I ever met, take her in her special line of literature.

"Again, I found a primary school teacher, a good one, who has taught in the same school for years, and who has made a great success of her work, who cannot tell the time of day on a clock! This I could hardly believe when she told me about it, but on inquiry among her acquaintances, I found it to be a fact. More than this, I have since found two similar cases, one that of a gentleman, the other that of a lady. The latter has quite a family of children, and they told me that their mother always asks them what time it is, whenever she wishes to know the hour.

"Again, I found a successful business man, one who has large interests in his hands and who manages them all well, who cannot go from his store to the post-office without a guide, though the places are only five blocks distant from each other, and there are only two corners to turn. His clerks tell me that he sometimes gets lost in his own store, and that they have to show him the way back to his desk! His sense of locality seems to be almost nil, and yet he can conduct the business of a large commercial house successfully.

"I found a number of people who cannot tell one tune from another, and many whose ears are dull when it comes to hearing a high and piercing note. I remember one man who could not hear a cricket chirping in a room where a dozen other persons, sitting near him, could hear the sound very plainly. This man was not deaf, as we ordinarily consider that infirmity. ordinary conversation as well as any one. But he could not hear the high and piercing note of a chirping cricket. I also found not a few people who were color-blind, and many who were 'short' in their sense of taste, and smell, and so on."

He could hear an

But the child is father to the man, and distributed all up and down the primary and grammar grades of our schools are these exceptions if one chooses to call them such. There is no doubt about it. Our author, whom we have quoted above, puts it this way:

"I now beg to state that I have found many children in our common schools who are born short, but whose teachers fail to recognize the fact, or, if they are aware of it, they refuse to take it into account in the matter of the education of these same children! That is what I want to say, and what I wish you would stop again for a minute and think about, right here! "It's true, isn't it? You know it is true of the children in your own room, don't you? There is Mary Martin, the beautiful little brunette who sits in the back seat, and whom the whole school, male and female, raves over, but who cannot get on in her number work, though she tries ever so hard to do so. I saw this girl (and her name is legion) in a school that I visited last week. She was thirteen, and in the A grade in the grammar room. Her class was working in fractions, and she, poor thing, was doing her level best to keep within hailing distance of them. In a bit of work that I gave to the class I had occasion, by way of illustration, to ask them to add together and. It was a simple thing, and the like of which they had been doing, off and on, for the last three years. The pupils were at their desks, each with pencil and paper, and each working alone. As soon as I uttered the problem I slipped down among the children and glanced at their workings as I went. The most of them were making quick work of the poor little snip of an example, and some of them had the result before I could get

to them.

But when I got down to my poor little girl who was born short on this 'lay' I found this: " + } = ?" !

"Now you have seen this same, haven't you yes, a thousand times? You have had such cases in your own school many times, doubtless. And if you have, what have you done about them? That is what I want to know, and what I should like to have you auswer to yourself, at least. I can tell you what has been done with such cases in most of the graded schools of this country, for the last twenty years. The fact of the shortage of this poor girl has been ignored; or, rather, perhaps, it has been held that there was no such shortage, and that the girl could be made to master what she had no head for. And on this basis she has been worked, and ground, and kept after school to learn her lessons, and put back into a lower grade, all along the line, because she couldn't keep up with her class in this or that particular study. Or, worse than this, in many cases teachers have set such children down as fools - to use a word which seems pretty strong here, but which I have known many teachers to use in such cases. But I want to say that these children are not fools; or, anyhow, they are often wiser than are the teachers who try to teach them regardless of what God intended they should learn.

"For instance, in the case of the little girl I have just spoken of, her teacher told me that she excelled in grammar and in history, but that she was so dull in numbers that she de-paired of ever getting her through her grade."

Now in every grade in all schools are found these children, The country takes better care of them, not, however, because it sees wisdom in its methods, but because circumstances prevent the massing of children together. It is a saying, (is it true?) that no genius ever came out of a graded school. If true, that single fact ought to set the educated mind to thinking. And here is Galton saying that great scientists are great because of the intellectual poverty of the domines of their youth. Rather, is it not? that the poor teacher was to them the best because, by being thrown upon their own resources, they thereby followed the "bent of their genius." Certainly it is true that these boys and girls who are stupid in numbers or grammar or geography, or who are dull at their books and yet faithful to the best of their ability, have a right to demand that no limb shall be stretched, or a single one lopped, to fit the iron bed of a graded system.

Duty of the Future.

Supt. Greenwood, in speaking of courses of educational lectures for teachers, says that, without compulsion by rule or regulation, those who most need information will be found absent from appointed meetings; and he instances that not more than a third of the teachers attended the scholarly lectures delivered by Dr. McAllister when that gentleman was at the head of the Philadelphia schools. Accepting this as a fact, nevertheless it seems to us that the only true way of enforcing attendance is not by "enforcing attendance, but by so legislating that pedlers shall keep to the highways with their wares and milliners shall trim their bonnets in the Bon Marchés They are not wanted in the schoolBut influences, anything but legitimate, get them there. These are the ones that "go through the daily grind' and draw their salaries with astonishing regularity." Supt. Greenwood is right when he says that to vitalize such dead and leaden material and attempt to get a vigorous growth into it, is very much like ploughing around last year's cornstalks with a view to raising a second crop. No rule or regulation will reach such teachers. And for the very good reason that a school-board that will tolerate them is influenced by the very motives that would wink at any disobedience of such a rule. Moreover, what would it boot if these pedlers and milliners did attend the "scholarly lectures" of the superin

rooms.

For example every good teacher knows that interest on the part of the child is essential to success; but while many are ingenious in devising means to arouse interest in this or that subject, Herbart plans for interest all the way through. In the choice and arrangement of subject matter, in correlation of studies, and in method of treatment, he thus provides for the continuance and growth of interest, and intensifies it, and yet brings it all out of the subject itself, under the skillful treatment of the teacher.

Herbart makes so much of interest in education both as a means and a result, that it occurs to me that if one were to represent his educational system in the form of an arch, one side of this arch would rest on the psychological basis of interest..

APPERCEPTION.

The other side would rest on the equally essential basis of apperception. May it not be that the thorough mastery of the two principles of interest and apperception has more to do with the success of the primary teacher, than the study of all the ponderous tomes of theoretical or historical psychology that have ever been written? Blessed hope that it may be so! It is worth the study of Herbart's Pedagogy to get waked up to the difference between that which makes for power in education, and that which merely loads the memory with words.

,

Interest and apperception sum up most of what is vital in educational psychology. "On these two hang all the law and the prophets." But what is this apperception? It is one thing to see another, to see and understand what you see; the latter is apperception. Understanding the new by means of the old is apperception; assimilating new ideas to old and related concepts is apperception. In other words, putting the new idea as a subject, into an old class as a predicate, is apperception. The inability to find a predicate for the new subject, is simply a failure to apperceive.

There are all degrees of perception from the vaguest sensation of a bodily pain to the clearest apprehension of an external object or event. This highest stage of perception seems rather more than perception, it is ad-perception. Interest fails, attention is lost and instruction is impossible, where apperception cannot take place. Interest likewise fails where there is dull repetition of already familiar truths. Who but an expert teacher, can steer safely between the Scylla of unperceivable facts and the Charybdis of already familiar facts? The incoming ideas must ever be in advance of the pupil's present knowledge, yet only one step in advance.

"HISTORICAL STEPS."

So much for the main psychological bases of Herbart's system. If the illustration of the arch were carried farther, we might, upon the foundation of apperception, build up one side of it with Her