Slike strani
PDF
ePub

nay even of something higher and better than justice-a necessary phase of developing and growing life. Men will long dispute about material socialism, about socialism considered as a matter of distribution of the material resources of the community; but there is a socialism regarding which there can be no such dispute -- socialism of the intelligence and of the spirit. To extend the range and the fullness of sharing in the intellectual and spiritual resources of the community is the very meaning of the community. Because the older type of education is not fully adequate to this task under changed conditions, we feel its lack and demand that the school shall become a social center. The school as a social center means the active and organized promotion of this socialism of the intangible things of art, science, and other modes of social inter

course.

THE RECENT REACTION IN FRANCE AGAINST ROUSSEAU'S NEGATION OF SOCIETY IN EDUCATION

MISS ANNA TOLMAN SMITH, UNITED STATES BUREAU OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C.

In the ten minutes at my disposal I can only touch upon the main points of the movement indicated by my subject, omitting all modifying conditions, all proportion and perspective. I have called it a reaction against Rousseau's anti-social doctrine, for it is only in that light that the present tendency can be fully estimated.

A century and a half have passed since Rousseau electrified Europe with his gospel of individuality. It voiced the protest of millions against a crushing social system and gave direction to their resistance. That resistance culminated in the French Revolution and has found permanent effect in the French republic.

We can easily understand that Rousseau's teachings have profoundly affected primary education, the particular agency by which the new social order in France has built itself up. Many of us have felt the charm of the Émile, but we have never felt it as a Frenchman feels it. It flatters his national pride by the sense of a power that has affected all other peoples, and it thrills his national sympathies by the qualities which he adores: precision, lucidity, and extraordinary invention. Rousseau is his world-genius cast in a national type; as such he figures in the French university programs and in the lessons and lectures on pedagogy in all French normal schools.

The ideas advanced in the Émile were not, it may be admitted, original with Rousseau; they were ideas widely diffused at the time as vague theories or coldly didactic formulas; Rousseau gave them the power of living personalities.

A single one of these ideas concerns us here, namely the effacement of society in the educating process. In the case of Émile the effacement is assisted by an isolation of the pupil after the Robinson Crusoe model, but this artificial condition, impossible for the ordinary child, and not complete even in the imaginary instance, is not essential to the purpose. The effacement or negation of society is really accomplished in the mind of the tutor. It is in his way of regarding the pupil, the natural man as opposed to civilized man, and in his conception of the educating process based upon and motived by this notion.

Now these two elements, a principle and its application, comprise all that is essential in a system. They may be generalized as regulations and applied to collective groups of children or infused into the minds of teachers to generate therein a subtle, potent influence, as is the case with the French teachers.

But how, we may ask, had social influences penetrated French education before Rousseau's day? By social influences we must understand in this connection the various forms which manifest the spiritual ideals of the race: art, or the expression of man's esthetic ideals, history or the record of his institutional ideals, and religion the expression of his moral ideals.

Up to 1789 these were the essential parts of education in France, as elsewhere. The French Revolution, of which Rousseau has been called the forerunner, destroyed them. They appeared no more in the specialized schools that rose on the ruins of the old universities, nor in those peculiar secondary schools, "les écoles centrales," which in 1795 took the place of the ancient colleges. In the new schools no subjects were to be treated except "such as are plainly within the reach of the understanding," and morals were to be taught upon "the sole authority of nature."

This didactic form of stating Rousseau's precepts passed over to the republic of 1870 and became a living force in its primary schools.

The programs elaborated for these schools in 1886 gave, it is true, equal recognition to the threefold nature of man, physical, intellectual, and moral, but under the circumstances the stress of effort went wholly to the intellectual. The directions with respect to this division have the Rousseau stamp. "It is proposed," they say, "to instruct the child in a limited number of subjects, but chosen in such a manner that they will not only assure to him all the practical knowledge of which he has need, but that they shall excite his faculties, form his spirit, cultivate and extend it and constitute a true education. To this end the method of training should be essentially intuitive and practical." In other words, it was education keyed upon the particular interests of the children of the working classes, without regard to those ideal possibilities which they share in common with other children.

Both the temper of the people and political necessities tended to detach the state primary school from social and ethical influences. One bond, indeed, united it firmly to organized society, namely the industrial demands of a thrifty, practical people, but this was an influence in its essence individual or non-social.

The administration of primary education under the French republic has been conducted on two distinct tho not necessarily antagonistic lines, the one political, the other philosophic. The most significant fact in its remarkable history is the sudden convergence of the two upon one purpose, namely, that of shifting the system from the intellectual or rational to the ethical and social basis.

Tho the preparation has been prolonged, and to an extent conscious, the change itself has come like the sudden bloom of springtime. It is not the mere verbiage of official decrees, but a living purpose in the minds of teachers, an impassioned enthusiasm for the social whole conceived as the harmonious accord of intelligent minds animated by moral purposes, an ideal to which even children's minds may respond.

On the spiritual side this change is the outcome of the teachings of M. Marion, the first professor of pedagogy at the Sorbonne; of M. Pecaut, professor of ethics at the higher normal schools, and of M. F. Buisson, who was for twenty years the director of the primary system, and who followed M. Marion at the Sorbonne; on the political side the change is the outcome of government pressure intensified by clerical opposition. Under these influences solidarity has become the watchword in the French state schools, but it is solidarity based upon common standards of right and the sense of inward unity and mutual obligations.

This change of basis in the system was one of the revelations of the Paris Exposition. Of all the awards by which the jurors testified their high appreciation of the French educational exhibit, none carried such satisfaction to the recipients as that of a grand prize for the system of moral instruction. Its authors had worked in the spirit of constructive statesmen and the award was a flattering recognition of their purpose and their success. But this moral instruction carries with it a deepened social consciousness. It is the extreme opposite of Rousseau's isolation, and it calls for a process the reverse of that which his fancy dictated.

In this movement toward national solidarity on the part of the French republic there is a return to the principle of historic unity. This was illustrated in a striking manner by the retrospective exhibits which formed a unique feature of the Paris Exposition. There is also an evident purpose to center in the school the influences that make for social unity; hence the school "patronage societies" or corporations of friends of the school, who work for the social and industrial welfare of the pupils. These societies tend more and more to assimilate with those of

associations of former pupils known as les petites amis. The latter, which number now about 5,500, have both recreative and economic purposes.

I shall never forget an illustration of their spirit which I saw in a public school for boys in one of the poorest districts of Paris. The director humbly apologized for the shabby building, "the meanest," he said, "in the city." Altho scrupulously clean, it was indeed old, inconvenient, and crowded, but I recall his beaming countenance as we stood in the covered play-court, and he showed me there a little stage fitted up with the essential properties, and furnished with a scenic curtain, all provided by the society of former pupils attached to that school. Here, as he explained, they presented from time to time, for the entertainment of the present pupils and their friends, very fetching French plays or charming

concerts.

Above all the schools are the centers of that wonderful propaganda of popular intelligence which seeks to keep alive in the adult masses of France the passion for "the good, the beautiful, and the true."

This work comprises lectures, popular and instructive, courses of lessons in civics or the rights and duties of citizens, in economics applied to the conditions of ordinary life, in industrial science, i. e., agricultural and mechanical, and, for women, lessons in household thrift and arts and in the local industries accessible to them. For the scientific, historic, and literary courses, syllabi are prepared by eminent professors who have the French art of simplifying the difficult. These outlines are freely distributed thruout the country. Teachers, professors, and patriotic citizens are united in maintaining the work. The government gives aid by an annual appropriation and by the loan of lantern slides and other illustrative material. It also rewards the teachers who are most zealous in the cause by a much-coveted prize.

The aim is to make every school a center of civic life, union, and aspiration. This purpose, however, is not suffered to interfere with the regular routine of the school, for in the French system the professional character of the school is most carefully guarded against outside interference and distractions.

In Protestant countries the public primary school has been called the child of the Reformation. In France it almost seems as if the Reformation was to be the child of the public school, for along with this transfer of the school from social isolation to social assimilation is a noticeable revival of religious consciousness in the church. This revival, which in the opinion of impartial observers is drawing the French Catholic church to a sympathetic understanding of the republic, in the Reformed or Protestant church, is apparently working toward a deeper sense of the value of institutional life.

THE COMMON-SCHOOL COMMUNITY

OSIAN H. LANG, EDITOR OF THE "SCHOOL JOURNAL," NEW YORK CITY

[AN ABSTRACT]

Viewed comprehensively, and in its last analysis, education is preeminently a religious problem in that it seeks the progressive good of mankind. Religion is here taken in the sense which, Matthew Arnold assures us, best accords with the intention of human thought and language in the use of the word, to-wit: "ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling."

Generally speaking, the duty of educating a child devolves upon the parents. But the varied and complex relationship of life in the civilization of the present have rendered it impossible for the family to supply an education satisfactory to organized society as represented by

the state.

By virtue of its protectory and supervising functions the state exercises the right of holding parents to account for their educational responsibilities. To be sure, with us the state is vitally interested only in the protection of individuals and social groups and their material possessions. With reference to individuals, compulsion of obedience to the two cardinal prohibitive commandments, "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal," sums up the chief care of the state. But the great law of selfpreservation necessarily impels the state to keep its foundations strong. and secure. Without this requisite strength and security the state could not possibly retain the power of enforcing compliance with its demands. Recognizing that its own stability is absolutely dependent upon the family, and that the preservation of the family rests wholly upon chastity, the state has added to its original functions the suppression of everything. that endangers this foundation of family life.

In the supervision of the education of the people the state directs its attention to three things:

1. That every individual shall acquire respect for law and order and right views of personal liberty.

2. That he shall become self-supporting.

3. That the unity and sacredness of the family be kept inviolate. These three things, then, represent the minimum requirements the state has a right to look for in the education of the family. Wherever one or the other is disregarded, the state may itself assume the parental prerogative of education.

Now, in order to satisfy these just demands, parents have long since. recognized the need of educational co-operation with other parents. Thus there developed the church and the common school.

The kind of educational assistance rendered by the churches does not

« PrejšnjaNaprej »