Francis B. Pearson - The Vitalized School

F >> Francis B. Pearson >> The Vitalized School

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17

Transcriber's note:

Italicized words are enclosed by underscores (_italic_).

Bold-faced words are enclosed by equal signs (=bold=).

THE VITALIZED SCHOOL

by

FRANCIS B. PEARSON

Superintendent of Public Instruction of Ohio
Author of "The Evolution of the Teacher"
"The High School Problem"
"Reveries of a Schoolmaster"

New York
The MacMillan Company
1918
Copyright, 1917,
by the MacMillan Company.
Published February, 1917.
Reprinted January, 1918.

PREFACE

The thoughtful observer must have noted in the recent past many
indications of an awakened interest both in the concept of education and
in school procedure on the part of school officials, teachers, and the
public. Educators have been developing pedagogical principles that
strike their roots deep into the philosophy of life, and now their
pronouncements are invading the consciousness of people of all ranks and
causing them to realize more and more that the school process is an
integral part of the life process and not something detached from life.

The following pages constitute an attempt to interpret some of the
school processes in terms of life processes, and to suggest ways in
which these processes may be made identical.

It is hoped that teachers who may read these pages may find running
through them a strand of optimism that will give them increased faith in
their own powers, a larger hope for the future of the school, and an
access of zeal to press valiantly forward in their efforts to excel
themselves.

F. B. P.

COLUMBUS, OHIO,
January, 1917.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. TEACHING SCHOOL
II. THE TEACHER
III. THE CHILD
IV. THE CHILD OF THE FUTURE
V. THE TEACHER-POLITICIAN
VI. SUBLIME CHAOS
VII. DEMOCRACY
VIII. PATRIOTISM
IX. WORK AND LIFE
X. WORDS AND THEIR CONTENT
XI. COMPLETE LIVING
XII. THE TIME ELEMENT
XIII. THE ARTIST TEACHER
XIV. THE TEACHER AS AN IDEAL
XV. THE SOCIALIZED RECITATION
XVI. AGRICULTURE
XVII. THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMUNITY
XVIII. POETRY AND LIFE
XIX. A SENSE OF HUMOR
XX. THE ELEMENT OF HUMAN INTEREST
XXI. BEHAVIOR
XXII. BOND AND FEAR
XXIII. EXAMINATIONS
XXIV. WORLD-BUILDING
XXV. A TYPICAL VITALIZED SCHOOL

THE VITALIZED SCHOOL

CHAPTER I

TEACHING SCHOOL

=Life and living compared.=--There is a wide difference between
school-teaching and teaching school. The question "Is she a
school-teacher?" means one thing; but the question "Can she teach
school?" means quite another. School-teaching may be living; but
teaching school is life. And any one who has a definition of life can
readily find a definition for teaching school. Much of the criticism of
the work of the schools emanates from sources that have a restricted
concept of life. The artisan who defines life in terms of his own trade
is impatient with much that the school is trying to do. He would have
the scope of the school narrowed to his concept of life. If art and
literature are beyond the limits of his concept, he can see no warrant
for their presence in the school. The work of the schools cannot be
standardized until life itself is standardized, and that is neither
possible nor desirable. The glory of life is that it does not have
fixity, that it is ever crescent.

=Teaching defined.=--Teaching school may be defined, therefore, as the
process of interpreting life by the laboratory method. The teacher's
work is to open the gates of life for the pupils. But, before these
gates can be opened, the teacher must know what and where they are. This
view of the teacher's work is neither fanciful nor fantastic; quite the
contrary. Life is the common heritage of people young and old, and the
school should be so organized and administered as to teach people how to
use this heritage to the best advantage both for themselves and for
others. If a child should be absent from school altogether, or if he
should be incarcerated in prison from his sixth to his eighteenth year,
he would still have life. But, if he is in school during those twelve
years, he is supposed to have life that is of better quality and more
abundant. Life is not measured by years, but by its own intensity and
scope. It has often been said that some people have more life in
threescore and ten years than Methuselah had in his more than nine
hundred years.

=Life measured by intensity.=--This statement is not demonstrable, of
course, but it serves to make evident the fact that some people have
more of life in a given time than others in the same time. In this
sense, life may be measured by the number of reactions to objectives.
These reactions may be increased by training. Two persons, in passing a
shop-window, may not see the same objects; or one may see twice as many
as the other, according to their ability to react. The man who was
locked in a vault at the cemetery by accident, and was not discovered
for an hour, thought he had spent four days in his imprisonment. He had
really lived four days in a single hour by reason of the intensity of
life during that hour.

=Illustrations.=--In the case of dreams, we are told that years may be
condensed into minutes, or even seconds, by reason of the rapidity of
reactions. The rapidity and intensity of these reactions make themselves
manifest on the face of the dreamer. Beads of perspiration and facial
contortions betoken intensity of feeling. In such an experience life is
intense. If a mental or spiritual cyclometer could be used in such a
case, it would make a high record of speed. Life sometimes touches
bottom, and sometimes scales the heights. But the distance between these
extremes varies greatly in different persons. The life of one may have
but a single octave; of the other, eight, or a hundred, or a thousand.
The life of Job is an apt illustration. No one has been able to sound
the depths of his suffering, nor has any one been able to measure the
heights of his exaltation. We may not readily compute the octaves in
such a life as his.

=The complexity of life.=--It is not easy to think life, much less
define it. The elements are so numerous as to baffle and bewilder the
mind. It looks out at one from so many corners that it seems Argus-eyed.
At one moment we see it on the Stock Exchange where men struggle and
strive in a mad frenzy of competition; at another, in a quiet home,
where a mother soothes her baby to sleep, where there is no competition
but, rather, a sublime monopoly. Again, it manifests itself in the
clanking of machinery where men are tunneling the mountain or
constructing a canal to unite oceans; or, again, in the laboratory where
the microscope is revealing the form of the snow crystal. One man is
watching the movements of the heavenly bodies as they file by his
telescope, while another writes a proclamation that makes free a race of
people. Another man is leading an army into battle, while some Doctor
MacClure is breasting the storm in the darkness as he goes forth on his
mission of mercy.

=Manifestations of life.=--These manifestations of life men call trade,
commerce, history, mathematics, science, nature, and philanthropy. And
men write these words in books, and other men write other books trying
to explain their meaning. Then, still others divide and subdivide, and
science becomes the sciences, and mathematics becomes arithmetic, and
algebra, and geometry, and trigonometry, and calculus, and astronomy.
Here mathematics and science seem to merge. And, in time, history and
geography come together, and sometimes strive for precedence.

Thus, books accumulate into libraries and so add another to the many
elements of life. Then magazines are written to explain the books and
their authors. The motive behind the book is analyzed in an effort to
discover the workings of the author's mind and heart. In these
revelations we sometimes hear the rippling of the brook, and sometimes
the moan of the sea; sometimes the cooing of the dove, and sometimes the
scream of the eagle; sometimes the bleating of the lamb, and sometimes
the roaring of the lion. In them we see the moonbeams that play among
the flowers and the lightning that rends the forest; the blossoms that
filter from the trees and the avalanche that carries destruction; the
rain that fructifies the earth and the hurricane that destroys.

=Life in literature.=--Back of these sights and sounds we discover
men--Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante. We
trace the thoughts and emotions of these men and find literature. And in
literature, again, we come upon another manifestation of life.
Literature is what it is because these men were what they were. They saw
and felt life to be large and so wrote it down large; and because they
wrote it thus, what they wrote endures. They stood upon the heights and
saw the struggles of man with himself, with other men, and with nature.
This panorama generated thoughts and feelings in them, and these they
could not but portray. And so literature and life are identical and not
cooerdinates, as some would have us think.

=Life as subject matter in teaching.=--In teaching school, therefore,
the subject matter with which we have to do is life--nothing more and
nothing less. We may call it history, or mathematics, or literature, or
psychology,--but it still remains true that life is the real objective
of all our activities. And, as has been already said, we are teaching
life by the laboratory method. We are striving to interpret the thing in
which we are immersed. We feel, and think, and aspire, and love, and
enjoy. All these are life; and from this life we are striving to extract
strength that our feeling may be deeper, our thinking higher, our
aspirations wider and more lofty, our love purer and nobler, and our own
enjoyment greater. By absorbing the life that is all about us we strive
to have more abundant and abounding life.

=The teacher's province.=--Such is the province of one who essays the
task of teaching school. School is life, as we have been told; but, at
the same time, it is a place and an occasion for teaching life. If we
could detach history from life, it would cease to be history. If
literature is not life, it is not literature; and so with the sciences.
These branches are but variants or branches of life, and all emanate
from a common center. Whether we scan the heavens, penetrate the depths
of the sea, pore over the pages of books, or look into the minds and
hearts of men, we are striving after an interpretation of life.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. Distinguish between a "school teacher" and a "man or woman who
teaches school."

2. Discuss the importance of the following agencies of the school in
securing for children "life of a better quality and more abundant":
play; revitalized curricula; vitalized teachers; medical inspection;
social centers; moral instruction.

3. Discuss both from the standpoint of present practice and ideal
educational principles: "More abundant life rather than knowledge is the
chief end of instruction."

4. What changes are necessary in school curricula and in the methods of
school organization, instruction, and discipline, in order that the
chief purpose of our schools, "more abundant _life_," may be realized?

5. Justify the apparent length of the school day to teachers and pupils,
as a means of determining the quality of the work of the school.

6. Some teachers maintain that school is a preparation for life, while
the author maintains that "school is _life_." Is this difference in the
concept of the school a vital one?

7. How may this difference of concept affect the work of the teacher?
the attitude of the pupil?

8. What definition of education will best harmonize with the ideals of
this chapter?

CHAPTER II

THE TEACHER

=Teachers contrasted.=--The vitalized school is an expression of the
vitalized teacher. In the hands of the teacher of another sort, the
vitalized school is impossible. Unless she can see in the multiplication
table the power that throws the bridge across the river, that builds
pyramids, that constructs railways, that sends ships across the ocean,
that tunnels mountains and navigates the air, this table becomes a
stupid thing, a dead thing, and an incubus upon the spirits of her
pupils. To such a teacher mathematics is a lifeless thing, without hope
or potency, the school is a mere convenience for the earning of a
livelihood, the work is the drudgery of bondage, and the children are
little less than an impertinence. The vitalized teacher is different. To
her the multiplication table pulsates with life. It stretches forth its
beneficent hand to give employment to a million workers, and food to a
million homes. It pervades every mart of trade; it loads trains and
ships with the commerce of nations; and it helps to amplify and ennoble
civilization.

=Vitalized mathematics.=--In this table she sees a prophecy of great
achievements in engineering, architecture, transportation, and the
myriad applications of science. In brief, mathematics to her is vibrant
with life both in its present uses and in its possibilities. She knows
that it is a part of the texture of the daily life of every home as well
as of national life. She knows that it pertains to individual,
community, and national well-being. Knowing this, she feels that it is
quite worth while for herself and her pupils, both for the present and
for the future. She feels that, if she would know life, she must know
mathematics, because it is a part of life; that, if she would teach life
to her pupils, she must teach them mathematics as an integral part of
life; and that she must teach it in such a way that it will be as much a
part of themselves as their bodily organs. She wants them to know the
mathematics as they know that the rain is falling or that the sun is
shining, because the rain, the sunshine, and the mathematics are all
elements of life. Her great aim is to have her pupils experience the
study just as they experience other phases of life.

=The teacher's attitude.=--Such a teacher with such a conception of life
and of her work finds teaching school the very reverse of drudgery. Each
day is an exhilarating experience of life. Her pupils are a part of life
to her. She enjoys life and, hence, enjoys them. They are her
confederates in the fine game of life. The bigness and exuberance of her
abundant life enfolds them all, and from the very atmosphere of her
presence they absorb life. Their studies, under the influence of her
magic, are as much a part of life to them as the air they breathe or the
food they eat. No two days are alike in her school, for life to-day is
larger than it was yesterday and so presents a new aspect. Her spirit
carries over into their spirits the truths of the books, and these
truths thus become inherent.

=College influences.=--She teaches life, albeit through the medium of
subjects and books, because she knows life. Her college work did not
consist in the gathering together of many facts, but in accumulating
experiences of life. Many of these experiences were acquired
vicariously, but they were no less real on that account. Her generous
nature was able to withstand the most assiduous efforts of some of her
teachers to quench the flames of life that glowed in the pages of books,
with the wet blanket of erudition. She was able to relive the thoughts
and feelings of the authors whose books she studied and so make their
experiences her own. She could reconstitute the emotional life of her
authors and gain potency through the transfusion of spirit. Her books
were living things, and she gleaned life from their pages.

=Reading and life.=--She can teach reading because she can read. Reading
to her is an experience in life. The words on the printed page are not
meaningless hieroglyphics. They are the electric wires which connect the
soul of the author with her own, and through which the current is
continually passing. When she reads Dickens, Tiny Tim is never a mere
boy with a crutch, but he is Tiny Tim, and, as such, neither men nor
angels can supplant him on the printed page. She knows the touch of him
and the voice of him. She laughs with him; she cries with him; she prays
with him; she lives with him. In her teaching she causes Tiny Tim to
stand forth like a cameo to her pupils, with no rival and no peer. This
she can do because he is a part of her life. She has no occasion either
to pose or to rhapsodize. Sincerity is its own explanation and
justification.

=Power of understanding.=--When she reads "Little Boy Blue" she can hear
the sobbing of a heartbroken mother and thus, vicariously, comes to know
the universality of death and sorrow. But she finds faith and hope in
the poem, also, and so can see the sunlight suffusing the clouds of the
mother's grief. Thus she enters into the feeling of motherhood and so
shares the life of all the mothers whose children are her pupils. In
every page she reads she crosses anew the threshold of life and gains a
knowledge of its joys, its sorrows, its triumphs, or its defeats. In
short, she reads with the spirit and not merely with the mind, and thus
catches the spiritual meaning of what she reads. She can feel as well as
think and so can emotionalize the printed page. Nature has endowed her
with a sensory foundation that reacts to the emotional situations that
the author produces. Thus she understands, and that is the prime
desideratum in reading. And because she understands, she can interpret,
and cause her pupils to understand. Thus they receive another endowment
of life.

=Books as exponents of life.=--She has time for reading as she has time
for eating and drinking, and for the same reason. To her they are all
cooerdinate elements of life. She eats, and sleeps, and reads because she
is alive; and she is more alive because she eats, and sleeps, and reads.
She taps the sources of spiritual refreshment, without parade, and
rejoices in the consequent enrichment of her life. She does not smite
the rock, but speaks to it, and smiles upon it, and the waters gush
forth. She descends into Hades with Dante, and ascends Sinai with Moses,
and is refreshed and strengthened by her journeys. She sits enrapt as
Shakespeare turns the kaleidoscope of life for her, or stands enthralled
by Victor Hugo's picture of the human soul. Her sentient spirit is
ignited by the fires of genius that glow between the covers of the book,
and her fine enthusiasm carries the divine conflagration over into the
spirits of her pupils. There is, therefore, no drag or listlessness in
her class in reading, because, during this exercise, life is as buoyant
and spontaneous as it is upon the playground.

=The meaning of history.=--In her teaching of history she invests all
the characters with life, because to her they are alive. And because
they are alive to her they are alive to her pupils. They are instinct
with power, action, life. She rehabilitates the scenes in which they
moved, and, therefore, they must be alive in order to perform their
parts. They are all flesh and blood people with all the attributes of
people. They are all actuated by motives and move along their appointed
ways obedient to the laws of cause and effect. They are not named in the
book to be learned and recited, but to be known. She causes her pupils
to know them as they would come to know people in her home. Nor do they
ever mistake one for the other or confuse their actions. They know them
too well for that. These characters are made to stand wide apart, so
that, being thus seen, they will ever after be known. History is not a
directory of names, but groups of people going about their tasks. They
hunger, and thirst, and love, and hate, and struggle with their
environment as their descendants are doing to-day.

=Language and vitality.=--When she is teaching a language, it is never
less than a living language. In Latin the syntax is learned as a means,
never an end. The big things in the study loom too large for that. The
pupils become so eager to see what Caesar will do next that they cannot
afford the time to stare long at a mere ablative absolute. They are
following the parade, and are not to be turned aside from their large
purpose by minor matters. They are made to see and hear Cicero; and Rome
becomes a reality, with its Forum, its Senate, and its Mamertine. When
Dido sears the soul of the faithless AEneas with her words of scorn, the
girls applaud and the boys tremble. When Troy burns, there is a real
fire, and Achates is as real as the man Friday. When the shipwrecked
Trojans regale themselves with venison, it is no make-believe dinner,
but a real one. Where such a teacher is, there can be no dead language,
no dry bones of history, and no stagnation in the stream of life.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What suggestions are offered for the vitalization of mathematics?
history? reading? language?

2. In what ways is vitalization of subject matter related to its
socialization?

3. How may motivation in teaching the multiplication table be assisted
by vitalization?

4. What is to be included in the term "read" in the sentence "She can
teach reading because she can read"?

5. Add to the author's list of children in literature whom the vitalized
teacher may introduce as companions to her pupils.

6. Why is extended reading essential to success in teaching?

7. What works of Dante have you read? of Victor Hugo? of Shakespeare?
How will the reading of such authors improve the teaching ability of
elementary teachers?

8. What are the distinguishing characteristics of the vitalized teacher?

CHAPTER III

THE CHILD

=The child as the center in school procedure.=--The child is the center
of school procedure in all its many ramifications. For the child the
building is erected, the equipment is provided, the course of study is
arranged and administered, and the teacher employed. The child is major,
and all else is subsidiary. In the general scheme even the teacher takes
secondary place. Teachers may come and go, but the child remains as the
focus of all plans and purposes. The teacher is secured for the child,
and not the child for the teacher. Taxpayers, boards of education,
parents, and teachers are all active in the interests of the child; and
all school legislation, to be important, must have the child as its
prime objective. Colleges of education and normal schools, in large
numbers, are working at the educational problem in an effort to develop
more effective methods of training the teachers of the child. A host of
authors and publishers are giving to the interest of the child the
products of their skill. In every commonwealth may be found a large
number of men and women whose time and energies are devoted to the work
of the schools for the child.

=All children should have school privileges.=--All these facts are
freely admitted, wherever attention is called to them, but we still have
truant officers, and child labor laws. We admit the facts, but, in our
practices, strive to circumvent their application. If the school is good
for one child, it is good for all children. Indeed, the school is
maintained on the assumption that all children will take advantage of
and profit by its presence. If there were no schools, our civilization
would surely decline. If school attendance should cease at the end of
the fifth year, then we would have a fifth-year civilization. It rests,
therefore, with the parents of the children, in large measure, whether
we are to have an eighth-grade civilization, a high-school civilization,
or a college civilization.

=Parental attitude.=--Schools are administered on the assumption that
every child is capable of and worthy of training, and that training the
child will make for a better quality of civilization. The state regards
the child as a liability during his childhood in the hope that he may be
an asset in his manhood. In this hope time and money are devoted to his
training. But, in the face of all this, there are parents, here and
there, who still look upon their own children as assets and would use
them for their own comfort or profit. They seem to think that their
children are indebted to them for bringing them into the world and that
their obligation to the children is canceled by meager provision of
food, shelter, and clothing. They seem not to realize that "life is more
than fruit or grain," and deny to their children the elements of life.

=The rights of the child.=--All this is a sort of preface to the
statement that the child comes into the world endowed with certain
inherent rights that may not be abrogated. He has a right to life in its
best and fullest sense, and no one has a right to abridge this measure
of life, or to deprive him of anything that will contribute to such a
life. He goes to the school as one of the sources of life, and any one
who denies him this boon is doing violence to his right to have life. He
does not go to school to study arithmetic, but studies arithmetic as one
of the elements of life; and experience has demonstrated that arithmetic
may be learned in the school more advantageously than elsewhere. He goes
to school to have agreeable and profitable life. Each day is an integer
of life and must be made to abound in life if it is to be accounted a
success.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17