The influence which the industrial changes of the past hundred years has had on education is considerable. With the transformation of the home workshop into the factory has come the transition from rural and village life to life in great industrial cities and towns. The introduction of specialized machinery has placed upon education the burden of vocational training. More important still, it has so augmented the size of the educational problem that an intricate system of school machinery has been devised to keep the whole in order.

The rural, or village, school was a one or two-room affair, housing a handful of pupils. Aside from matters of discipline, the administration of the school was scarcely a problem. General superintendents, associate superintendents, compulsory attendance laws, card index systems, and purchasing departments were unknown. The school was a simple, personal business conducted by the teacher in very much the same way that the corner grocer conducted his store—on faith and memory.

The growth of cities and towns necessitated the introduction of elaborate school machinery. In place of a score of pupils, thousands, tens, and even hundreds of thousands were placed under the same general authority. City life made some form of administrative machinery inevitable.

The increasing size of the school system,—and in new, growing cities the school system increases with a rapidity equal to the rate of growth of the population,—leads to increase in class size. A school of twenty pupils is still common in rural districts. In the elementary grades of American city schools, investigators find fifty, sixty, and in some extreme cases, seventy pupils under the charge of one teacher, while the average number, per teacher, is about forty.

Recrimination is idle. The obvious fact remains that the rate of growth in school population is greater than the rate of growth in the school plant. The schools in many cities have not caught up with their educational problem. The result is a multiplication of administrative problems, not the least of which is the question of class size.

II Rousseau Versus a Class of Forty

A toilsome journey it is from the education of an individual child by an individual teacher (Rousseau’s Emile) to the education of forty children by one teacher (the normal class in American elementary city schools). Rousseau pictured an ideal; we face a reality—complex, expanding, at times almost menacing.

The difference between Rousseau’s ideal and the modern actuality is more serious than it appears superficially. Rousseau’s idea permitted the teacher to treat the child as an individuality, studying the traits and peculiarities of the pupil, building up where weakness appeared, and directing freakish notions and ideas into conventional channels. The modern city school with one teacher and forty pupils places before the teacher a constant temptation, which at times reaches the proportions of an overmastering necessity, to treat the group of children as if each child were like all the rest. A teacher who can individualize forty children, understand the peculiarities of each child, and teach in a way that will enable each of the children to benefit fully by her instruction, is indeed a master, perhaps it would be fairer to say a super-master in pedagogy. A class of forty is almost inevitably taught as a group.

There is another feature about the large school system which is even more disastrous to the welfare of the individual child. Rousseau studied the individual to be educated, and then prescribed the course of study. The city teacher, no matter how intimately she may be acquainted with the needs of her children, has little or no say in deciding upon the subjects which she is to teach her class. Such matters are for the most part determined by a group of officials—principals, superintendents, and boards of education,—all of whom are engaged primarily in administrative work, and some of whom have never taught at all, nor entered a psychological laboratory, nor engaged in any other occupation that would give first-hand, practical, or theoretical knowledge of the problems encountered in determining a course of study.

A course of study must be devised, however, even though some of the responsible parties have no first-hand knowledge of the points at issue. The method by which it is devised is of peculiar importance to this discussion. The administrative officials, having in mind an average child, prepare a course of study which will meet that average child’s needs. Theoretically, the plan is admirable. It suffers from one practical defect,—there is no such thing as an average child.

III The Fallacious “Average”

Averages are peculiarly tempting to Americans. They supply the same deeply-felt want in statistics that headlines do in newspapers. They tell the story at a glance. In this peculiar case the story is necessarily false.

An average may be taken only of like things. It is possible to average the figures 3, 4, and 8 by adding them together and dividing by 3. The average is 5. Such a process is mathematically correct, because all of the units comprising the 3, 4, and 8 are exactly alike. One of the premises of mathematics is that all units are alike, hence they may be averaged.

Unlike mathematical units, all children are different. They differ in physical, in mental, and in spiritual qualities. Their hair is different in color and in texture. Their feet and hands vary in size. Some children are apt at mathematics, others at drawing, and still others at both subjects. Some children have a strong sense of moral obligation,—an active conscience,—others have little or no moral stamina. No two children in a family are alike, and no two children in a school-room are alike. After an elaborate computation of hereditary possibilities, biologists announce that the chance of any two human creatures being exactly alike is one in five septillions. In simple English, it is quite remote.

IV The Five Ages of Childhood

A very ingenious statement of the case is made by Dr. Bird T. Baldwin. Children, says Dr. Baldwin, have five ages,—

1. A chronological age,
2. A physical age,
3. A mental age,
4. A moral age,
5. A school age.

Two children, born on the same day, have the same age in years. One is bound to grow faster than the other in some physical respect. Therefore the two children have different physical ages, or rates of development. In the same way they have differing mental and moral ages. The school age, a resultant of the first three, is a record of progress in school. Even when children are born on the same day, the chances that they will grow physically, mentally, and morally at exactly the same rate, and will make exactly the same progress in school, are remote indeed. School children are, therefore, inevitably different.

V Age Distribution in One Grade

A very effective illustration of the differences in chronological age, in school age, and in the rate of progress in school is furnished in the 1911 report of the superintendent of schools for Springfield, Mass. There are in this report a series of figures dealing with the ages, and time in school, of fifth-grade pupils in Springfield. The first table shows the number of years in school and the age of all the fifth-grade pupils.

Table 1

Age and Time in School, Fifth Grade, Springfield, December, 1911

Theoretically, children in Springfield enter the school at six, and spend one year in each grade. If all of the children in the Springfield schools had lived up to this theory, there would be 1,275 eleven years of age, and 1,275 in the fifth grade. A glance at the table shows that only 131, or about 10 per cent of the children, are both eleven years of age and five years in the school. Among the 1,275 fifth-grade children, 389, or 31 per cent, have been in school five years, and 329, or 26 per cent, are eleven years of age.

The superintendent follows this general table with other tables giving a more detailed analysis of over and under age pupils, and of rate of progress in school.

Table 2

Age and Progress Groups of Fifth-Grade Pupils in Springfield, December, 1911

The inferences from Table 2 are very clear. Of the 1,275 fifth-grade pupils, 435, or 34 per cent, are not only under-age for the grade, but they have progressed at more than normal speed. They are the exceptionally capable pupils of the grade. At the other extreme we find 209 children, or 16 per cent of all in the grade, who need special attention because they are both over-age and slow. Feeble-minded children rarely advance beyond the second grade; hence we know that none of these are feeble-minded, but among their number will be found many who will be little profited by the ordinary curriculum; 110 of them are already 12 years old, and 75 are 13 years old. A majority of them will, in all probability, drop out of school as soon as they reach the age of 14, unless prior to that time some new element of interest is introduced that will make a strong appeal; for example, some activity toward a vocation.

A further study of the over-age column shows that 31 pupils, 2 per cent, are over-age, but they have reached their present position in less than usual time; while 63 of them, also over-age, have required the full five years to reach their present grade position. Unless by limiting the required work of these over-age pupils to the essentials, or by some administrative arrangement involving special grouping with relatively small numbers in a class, so that we can in the one case maintain, and in the other case bring about, accelerated progress, there is little likelihood that any large number will remain in school to complete the ninth grade, much less take a high school course; for four years hence their ages will range from 16 to 18 years. The 124 pupils who are of normal age, but slow, are also subjects for special attention, for they have repeated from one to three grades, or have failed to secure from two to six half-yearly promotions, and are in danger of acquiring the fatal habit of failure, if they have not already acquired it.

The superintendent then goes on to emphasize the imperative duty resting on each principal, to examine and to understand the varying capacities of individual children in his school. Without such an understanding real educational progress cannot be made.

This study is most illuminating. Nothing could more effectually show variation in individual children than the difference in one city grade of the most obvious of characteristics—age and progress in school. The infinitely greater variations in the subtle characteristics that distinguish children can be more readily guessed at than measured. Under these circumstances, the attempt to prepare studies for an “average child” is manifestly futile. The course may be organized, but it will hardly meet the needs of large numbers of the individual children who take it.

VI Shall Child or Subject Matter Come First?

The old education presupposed an average child, and then prepared a course of study which would fit his needs. The new education recognizes the absurdity of averaging unlike quantities, and accepts the ultimate truth that each child is an individual, differing in needs, capacity, outlook, energy, and enthusiasm from every other child. An arithmetic average can be struck, but when it is applied to children it is a hypothetical and not a real quantity. There is not, and never will be, an average child; hence, a school system planned to meet the needs of the average child fits the needs of no child at all.

Mathematics may be taught to the average child. So may history and geography. While subject matter comes first in the minds of educators, a course of study designed to meet average conditions is a possibility. The moment, however, that the schools cease to teach subjects and begin to teach boys and girls, such a proceeding is out of the question.

The temptation in a complex school system, where children are grouped by hundreds and thousands, to allow the detail of administration to overtop the functions of education is often irresistible. The teacher with forty pupils learns to look upon her pupils as units. The superintendent and principals, seeking ardently for an overburdened commercial ideal named “efficiency,” sacrifice everything else to the perfection of the mechanism. Among the smooth clicking cogs, child individuality has only the barest chance for survival.

VII The Vicious Practices of One “Good” School

There are school systems in which organization has overgrown child welfare, in which pedagogy has usurped the place of teaching. In such systems the teacher teaches the prescribed course of study, whether or no. The officers of administration, aiming at some mechanical ideal, shape the schools to meet the requirements of system.

The proneness of some teachers and school administrators alike to overemphasize mechanics, and to underemphasize the welfare of individual children is well illustrated in a recent statement by Dr. W. E. Chancellor, who, in writing of a first-hand investigation made in a city in the Northeast, describes a condition which he says “I know by fairly authoritative reports does exist in a considerable number of cities and towns—not merely in a school here and there, but generally and characteristically.

“In the city to which I definitely refer,” Dr. Chancellor continues, “I found that the intermediate and grammar grade teachers had systematically, deliberately, and successfully sacrificed hundreds of boys and girls upon the altar of examinations to the fetish of good schools. They have been so anxious to have good schools that they have kept an average of 20 per cent of their pupils one grade lower than they belong. In some schools the average runs to above 35 per cent.

“Some teachers and some school superintendents cannot see that the school is simply a machine for developing boys and girls; cannot see that the machine in itself is worthless save as it contributes to human welfare. A school may be so good as actually to damage the souls and bodies of human beings. It damages their souls when the machine operators, seeking 75 per cent in every subject, keep boys and girls in grammar schools until they average sixteen years of age.”[19] Dr. Chancellor continues with a stinging arraignment of school officials who sacrifice children to systems.

The article strikes an answering chord in the experiences of many men and women. A friend came recently to our bungalow, and, with a troubled face, spoke of his daughter’s ill-health.

“She is not sick,” he said, “but just ailing. These first May days have taken her appetite. She needs the country air.”

The daughter was a dear little girl of twelve—any one might have envied the father of his treasure—and we offered to keep her with us for a month in the country, and to go over her school work with her every day. The father accepted our proposal on the spot, but two days later he came back to say that he could not make the arrangements.

“It cannot be done,” he explained, “because the school will not let her off. I told the principal about my daughter’s health and showed him the advantage of a month in the country with her school work carefully supervised. Her school is rather crowded, and as I want her to go on with her class in the autumn, I asked him if he could arrange to keep her place for her. In reply he said,—

“‘I cannot do as you wish. Such cases as yours interfere seriously with the working of the school.’”

VIII Boys and Girls—The One Object of Educational Activity

Perhaps our language was not as temperate as it should have been, but we told that father something which we would fain repeat until every educator and every parent in the United States has heard it and written it on the tables of his heart,—

THE ONE OBJECT OF EDUCATION IS TO ASSIST AND PREPARE CHILDREN TO LIVE.

Why have we established a billion-dollar school system in the United States? Is it to pay teachers’ salaries, to build new school houses, and to print text-books by the million? Hardly. These things are incidents of school business, but they are no more reason for the school’s existence than fertilizer and seed are reasons for making a garden. Gardens are cultivated in order to secure plants and flowers; the school organization of which Americans so often boast exists to educate children.

“Of course,” you exclaim, “we knew that before.” Did you? Then why was my friend forced to choose between the wreck of his daughter’s health and the disarrangement of a bit of school machinery? Why is Dr. Chancellor able to describe a situation existing “generally and characteristically,” in which the welfare of children is bartered away for high promotion averages? The truth is that society still tolerates, and often accepts, the belief that the purpose of education is the formation of a school system. We have yet to learn that, to use Herbert Spencer’s phrase, the object of education is the preparation of children for complete living.

Education exists for the purpose of preparing and assisting children to live. To do that work effectively, it must devote only so much effort to school administration and to school machinery as will perform for boys and girls that very effective service.

No two children are alike, and no two children have exactly similar needs. There are, however, certain kinds of needs which all children have in common. It is obviously impossible to discuss in the abstract the needs of any individual child. It is just as obviously possible to analyze child needs, and to classify them in workable groups. It is true that all children are different; so are all roses different, yet all have petals and thorns in common. Similarly, there are certain needs which are common to all children who play, who grow, who live among their fellows, and who expect to do something in life. The matter may be stated more concretely thus,—

I. The school exists to assist and prepare children to live.

II. Living involves three kinds of needs, which it is the duty of the school to understand and interpret.