Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
These papers, reprinted with slight additions from the pages of the “New Republic,” through the courtesy of the editors, do not pretend to be anything more than glimpses and paraphrases of new tendencies in the American school and college. The public school is the most interes...
These papers, reprinted with slight additions from the pages of the “New Republic,” through the courtesy of the editors, do not pretend to be anything more than glimpses and par...
2. Part 2Indeed, as the average city public school is at present organized, there is every reason to believe that most of the children get practically all their education before their te...
3. Part 3Beyond all else the child should leave school with a wide and reliable imagination--not with facts or theories so much as pictures, sympathies, apprehensions, what we call “the...
4. Part 4A laudable attempt has been made in the colleges to teach the student to think, but I wonder sometimes whether it has proceeded very far beyond encouraging him to find reasons f...
5. Part 5European experience tends, too, to challenge the common assumption of American educators that quality of teaching is proportional to salaries paid. American salaries are certain...
6. Part 6Its very informality is its charm and success. The hundred or more children are not classified in grades, but in “life-classes,” which correspond roughly to those three periods...
7. Part 7I mention this because it is typical of Mr. Wirt’s genius to obliterate artificial lines and avoid mechanical groupings. His ideal school is one like the Emerson in Gary, a comp...
8. Part 8In the second place, the plan solves most of the problems of vocational and industrial training which now confront the public school. It catches the child’s curiosity and skill...
9. Part 9The “old” education then is a class-education, and therefore has no place in a society which is trying to become democratic. How much class-feeling is behind the current allegia...
10. Part 10The Gary plan, on the other hand, prepares for a genuinely vocational life. It views the world outside the school not as a collection of trades but as a community, a network of...
11. Part 11The movement for vocational education has done nothing more valuable than to show us how far we are still from realizing the public school as a child-community, first of all as...
12. Part 12The undergraduate can scarcely be blamed for responding to a system which so strongly resembles his sports, or for bending his energies to playing the game right, rather than as...