Indirect education.

THE

HE development of education in this period is the greatest America has known. Not improperly might be compared, in its great personalities and its insatiable Athenian-like search for "some new thing" to the Periclean age of Greece, or, in its illuminating and vivifying power, to the English Renaissance of the Sixteenth century.

There were historically logical causes for this great awakening in educational lines and this new birth of educational ideas. Some of these causes were the tremendous moral

and intellectual upheaval of antebellum and inter-bellum discussions, such as the freedom of the slave, the preservation of the Union, and a deeper realization of educational needs, brought about by the Civil War itself and the profound changes which it introduced. In the fifty years since the war, the more than doubling of population, the attempt to assimilate 20,000,000 foreigners, the unparalleled development along a thousand channels in commerce, industry, inventions, arts and sciences - the sudden obtrusion of the needs of the

the United States since 1865, etc.; and Lee S. Pratt, formerly Professor in Park and Knox Colleges.

ignorant but aspiring freedmen, the insistent labor question, the increasing practicality of the American outlook on life and its demands- these and myriads of other startlingly kaleidoscopic changes have compelled educational methods to a corresponding advance. Such progress, at first slow but, with growing confidence, constantly accelerated, is, nevertheless, genuine and is sane and sound in principles and tendencies.

It was no chance coincidence, then, but a natural and significant evolution, that at the very beginning of this period, only two years after the close of the Civil War, Congress established a Bureau of Education at Washington under the control of a Commissioner of Education. Education. This Bureau has no executive functions, but serves an extremely useful purpose in compiling school statistics and giving a composite, world-wide resumé of information regarding school organization, methods and régime a veritable clearing-house of educational knowledge. State boards, on the other hand, are usually administrative, the scope and character of control varying in different States.

that gave a perpetual endowment of nearly $85,000,000. Large additions to this fund have been made by all the States, so that now the total annual income from public school funds amounts to over $10,000,000.

Another general factor in the way of stimulus and inspiration, as well as the introduction, promotion and unification unification of new principles and

methods, has grown out of the meetings and reports of the National Education Association. In 1870 this useful organization reanimated the work of the National Teachers' Association which had been somewhat interrupted by the war; so that the real usefulness of the later body, whose annual meetings now attract an attendance of from 25,000 to 40,000 teachers, covers the period we are considering, and is an index as well as accelerator of its educational progress.

The centralizing tendency of modern education is shown in many ways, but especially in the power of the city superintendent, and the growth of the

locations, in place of the many "little red schoolhouses," dear to sentimental memory perhaps, but painfully isolated and often desperately behind the times. The town

ship high school is also a part of the new order of things, which places the privileges of secondary education within the grasp of a larger number of children in a rural community. The greatest practical difficulty in inaugurating these changes was overcome by legal provisions for free transportation, and it has been found that, even with this additional expenditure (averaging about 8 cents a day per pupil), the "township unit " is a saving in expense over that of maintaining the larger number of rural schools. It also insures "better teachers and equipment, better supervision, greater regularity of pupils' attendance, and a better school spirit." *

The total number of public schools in the United States in 1910 was

* See Edwin Grant Dexter, History of Educa tion in the United States, chap. xiii., "The Development of School Organization and Administration (1904). This work, and A. P. Laurie (ed.), The Teacher's Encyclopædia (7 vols., 1912), Paul Monroe (ed.), Cyclopædia of Education (3 vols., 1911, to be complete in 6 vols.), and John P. Garber, Annals of Educational Progress in 1910 and Current Educational Activities (1912) are especially helpful.

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country is only 70 per cent. of the enrolment, but in cities it is considerably higher, Indianapolis leading with 93 per cent., Dayton following with 90 per cent., and New York and Boston with 89 per cent. The expenditures on public education the same year were nearly $400,000,000, almost two-thirds of which went to elementary schools.

In 1871, in the first report of the Commissioner of Education in which statistics on the subject are included, only 9 States out of 37 reported their public school tax. The total amount of revenue from these States was $27,811,803.88; this ratio, if carried out, would be expected to go over $100,000,000, but the estimate would be liberal if it should reach half that sum, as, among the States not reporting, was the entire Southern group where educational, as well as political and industrial conditions, were at that time chaotic. Let one make the estimate for 1871 as liberal as he dares, the contrast with the magnificent income, from all sources, for the common schools, of $403,647,289 in 1909, is eloquent. Almost as significant are the two facts that the amount we were spending on our public schools in the latter year was an 86 per cent. increase over 1900, and that the large

item in this increase was the income from local taxation - indicating the growing willingness of the people to tax themselves, in this immediate and direct way, for the support of their common schools.*

The accelerated progress of our public school system is graphically indicated from another point of view by examining the expense accounts of this decade (1900-1909). As the population of the country was growing more rapidly than the school population, it cost $2.84 per capita of population to meet school expenditures in 1900, and $4.45 in 1909, or an increase of only about 56 per cent. to meet the increase in total expenditures of 86 per cent. In the same period, the total expenditure per pupil for common school purposes increased from $20.21 to $31.65, or at the exact rate, curiously enough, of the per capita increase-56 per cent.

The close of the Civil War found the public school system, outside of the rural schools and such town or city schools as made any attempt whatever at classification, roughly divided. into primary; elementary, intermediate, graded or grammar; and high. In many cases there were only two divisions, the primary being merged with the intermediate.t

any, advance was made in methods until the whole system was revolutionized and vitalized by the introduction into the public schools of the Froebel kindergarten. This was in 1873, at St. Louis, when Miss Susan E. Blow, in coöperation with Superintendent-of-Schools W. T. Harris, organized a kindergarten under full control of public authorities as an integral part of the city school system. True, about a dozen German kindergartens had previously been started in German-speaking communities - the first one in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1855, by Mrs. Carl Schurz; and the first kindergarten for English-speaking children had been organized at Boston, in 1860, by Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody," the apostle of the kindergarten in the United States." with the successful outcome of the St. Louis experiment, the kindergarten assumed as rightful a relation to the public school system as was held by any of the other grades. Within two years nearly 100 public schools had adopted the kindergarten; by 1880, 400; and in 1904 the report of Commissioner of Education the showed that there were over 3,000 public kindergartens attended by nearly The number of 200,000 children. private kindergartens was then estimated to be about 1,500.*

But

* A new trend in primary education, which is attracting much attention, is the Montessori System' as developed by Dr. Maria Montessori, docent of the University of Rome, in her celebrated "Houses of Childhood." Its central idea is that of auto-education and auto-discipline

The intermediate and high schools constitute the largest bulk of the public school system and cover the important years in a pupil's life. Even before the war the studies, except in

the rural and very small schools, had of course outstripped "the three R's of sainted memory; but in the last forty years at least, going back to the time when the country first got its breath again, the range of the curriculum in both the elementary and secondary school had almost appallingly widened, some high schools of to-day offering almost as liberal an education, in point of ground covered, as many colleges of yesterday.

In the intermediate schools, radical improvement has been made in methods of teaching the great fundamental subjects, unless it be spelling which, although not yet a lost art, has been somewhat neglected, to the detriment of outer evidences that a child may have to show of having received even a "common-school education." Reading has gained both in method, which is now 66 phonetic," and in spirit interpretative rather than declamatory. Grammar, which most of us, as children, " hated," has passed from parsing "and" diagraming to "English-study," which is more practical, attractive and assimilative,

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under the essential condition of the liberty of the child." Those interested in the subject should read: Garber, Current Educational Activities, pp. 164-172 (1912); Anna Tolman Smith, The Montessori System of Education, Bureau of Education Bulletin 17 (1912); and an article in McClure's Magazine (May, 1911).

proceeds

though some think less sternly sturdy than the "rules" that, after all, controlled the style of Nineteenth century literature. Arithmetic now concerns itself with present problems, seeking to meet present conditions. Geography now "from within, out," beginning with the schoolhouse grounds and the home town, county and State, and ramifying into commercial geography and physiography.* Nature-study has become a very important and beneficial part of the curriculum. By using the abundant seasonal resources at hand, even if there is no opportunity for cultivating school gardens,† scholars obtain, in an intensely interesting way, more than an elementary knowledge of plant and animal life; learn to observe closely and reason carefully; and, better still, imbibe a love of Na

ture and cultivate an æsthetic taste that opens their eyes to an appreciation of the beauties of the world around them. The study of history has lost as a mere record of facts largely political and somewhat unrelated and has gained in the human and humanistic aspects. Drawing has become a study; music is now regularly taught, not simply sung; hygiene no longer

physiology"

Jacques W. Redway, The New Basis of Geography (1901).

Those interested should consult the chapters on Nature Study" and "School Gardens in Laurie, Teacher's Encyclopedia, vol. ii., pp. 1-21, and 197-227.

Henry E. Bourne, The Teaching of History and Civics in the Elementary and Secondary Schools (1903).