Part 12

I would simply say that this report should be entitled to the greatest respect. I shall go home and study it carefully and prayerfully. I move that a committee of fifteen be appointed to revise this report. [Great applause]

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PRESIDENT CHARLES DE GARMO, _Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania_: Fellow-teachers: Those who are to discuss this question this morning are placed under a great embarrassment. The report should have been distributed before this meeting. That it has not been, I learn is not the fault of the officers of the department. [Applause]

We might infer from what we have heard that the report is valueless. This is by no means the case. It is an estimate of educational values. Under the subject of language, I quote, “A survey of its educational value, subjective and objective, usually produces the conviction that it is to retain the first place.” Under arithmetic, “Side by side with language study is the study of mathematics in the school, claiming the second place in importance.” Under geography, “The educational value of geography, as it is and has been in elementary schools, is obviously very great. The educational value of geography is even more apparent if we admit the claims of those who argue that the present epoch is the beginning of an era.” As a critique of educational values the report is a very important one. I would like to call your attention to the correlation of the pupil to his environment. That, I think, is an important matter. They have departed, at least in principle, from that old formal discipline alone; this individual to be fitted for life must master his environment. The committee have examined the various studies as to their value, and that, I think, is a grand thing. I cannot see at all that it is a correlation of studies. It has been said in your hearing that the throwing of light by studies on each other was disregarded. The report presents a very different idea of the correlation of studies. The second address of last evening--by Miss Arnold--has been referred to as an illustration of bringing the studies together so that one throws light upon another. I think the idea that there is no need of reform will be reinforced by this report; that the report will have a reactionary effect upon those who think that way. The committee have denied that we need any reform, or have implied that we have the reform already. It seems that the name given to this report should be taken off and the heading “An essay on educational values” substituted instead. It is true that this committee have, at the beginning, laid down a principle that would make a correlation. The text is here, but the discussion is lacking. So far as I have read, I have found but little in the report which shows what the sequence of studies should be. There is a hint in arithmetic where it says, “Common fractions should come before decimals.” Is this attempt at the correlation of studies anything more than a series of tunnels through the educational fields with switch connections, so that if we start in at one end we are switched to this or that without any view of the whole journey? We may light these tunnels with electricity, perhaps, but, after all, we are spending eight years underground, switching from one tunnel to another. Now the other alternative is to go out into the world, out into the sunshine, and follow highways so clear that a child can examine all that is about them. It is possible to relate one subject to the other so that when it is dark the child, even if he has not the sun to lighten his eyes, can at least have some stars of hope above him.

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PRESIDENT OF THE DEPARTMENT: From the course the discussion has taken, it has seemed to me that Dr. Harris should say a word at this point and read some additional parts of the report.

W. T. HARRIS, _Commissioner of Education_: I must set myself right on Herbart. The report does not allude to Herbart anywhere except in respectful terms. The criticism of the use of Robinson Crusoe does not attribute its mistakes to the Herbartians. Perhaps they would not recognize it as a true statement of their method. To make Herbart of use in pedagogy we must to some extent ignore his philosophy. His usefulness in education is proportioned to his uselessness as a philosopher. What can we do with a philosopher who omits the will from the three departments of the mind and retains only intellect and feeling? Herbart was obliged to explain how man comes to act without the will. He explains that desire can be aroused by interest in such a way that action will follow. With this great defect, however, Herbart is valuable in education. His doctrine of apperception does not need any correction. His doctrine of interest, however, needs some limitation, because the idea of the will and the idea of duty are omitted from his system. He must make up by the idea of desire and the idea of interest. I am surprised that the claim is made here that the report does not treat the subject assigned to it. Correlation of studies is assumed to mean concentration of studies. There is no such definition to the word “correlation” in any dictionary; only four or five obscure books in the English language give the word correlation the meaning of concentration. I was told of this sense of the word correlation, but did not believe for a moment that it had been the intention of the department of superintendents, in appointing a committee on this subject, to have a report on the Herbartian idea of concentration.

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CHARLES MCMURRY, _State Normal University, Normal, Ill._: In one of your statements read: “Your committee would call attention in this connection to the importance of the pedagogical principle of analysis and isolation as preceding synthesis and correlation.” Now, as I understand it, this is what this committee has attempted to report. Now, he says that this precedes synthesis or correlation. I would like to know if there is any dictionary or number of dictionaries to make correlation mean what this says--the analysis and isolation of subjects of study.

I have been very much afraid that Dr. Harris would take refuge in the discussion of the subject of the will in which he distinguishes Herbart from others. The exclusion of the will is held as far as Herbart is concerned of moral education. Now I wish to say that Herbart has laid down more and better educational principles than any other philosopher.

The more difficult thing is not exactly the best thing for the child in the first and second grades. There was an old theory among the Latins that if the child could be made to go through the difficulties of a Latin speech, it would prepare him for the difficult things to follow. Now, we wish to have life and not dead formalism. I believe that a thoughtful study of this report will convince any one who is interested in children that it is formal, and is a production of this old idea, based upon language as the foundation of all education.

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PRESIDENT W. H. HERVEY, _Teachers’ College, New York_: I find myself drawn in two directions on this question. I fain would cleave to everything that has been said this morning as containing the truth. I believe that, so far as this report and these remarks confine themselves to educational principles, any one of us may agree most heartily. Only where they descend to particular applications are we at variance. We always are at variance when we descend from the clouds, but that is no objection to the clouds. Now, I take it there are arrayed before us the two opposing camps,--the Hegelian and the Herbartian. What does the Hegelian say? In order that you may know the world you must turn your back upon yourself and lose yourself; you lose your life that you may save it. Yon leave your home plate, go to the second base, then to the third base, and you make a home run. That is a true type of all development. What, on the other hand, is the standpoint of the Herbartian? What we know depends upon what we have known. And that is true. And what we can do, according to this philosophy, depends upon the interest, the kinetic energy. About this matter of will, we have the Calvinistic theology set over against the Unitarian. Hegel’s Lord was a man of war. Herbart brings us to view the New Jerusalem. He shows us the church, not militant, but triumphant. Herbart distinguishes the good from the evil and makes it impossible for a man to do a wrong deed or to think a wrong thought, and that, I take it, is even a higher attainment than the Hegelian philosophy has thought of. Any one who develops the will by the man-of-war idea will have a sorry will upon his hands. There is, with the young child, certainly, a synthesis, a correlation, a development of taste where the analysis is suppressed and unconscious; and yet, my friends, if you attempt to educate a boy in the upper grammar grades or the high school according to the same principles as the primary grades, you make a sorry muss of it. If we would pass from the state of the child to the state of the man, it is necessary for us to go through the dry bones of analysis.

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DR. B. A. HINSDALE, _University of Michigan, Ann Arbor_: There are two things which I wish very briefly to touch. First, I do not understand Dr. Harris, in speaking of Herbart and the will, to leave the subject in the form in which Dr. McMurry understood that matter. I understand that Herbart does not base morals open the will, but rather upon the feeling and the desires. Now, whether the will or the desires furnish a proper basis is a question I do not wish to discuss. Certainly, when any one says that the Doctor declared that Herbart does not take the question of morals into account he makes a mistake. I understand him to say that Herbart does not place morals upon the proper foundation. In regard to courses of study, there is no such thing as considering this question apart from criteria. Now, what are our criteria to be? That I do not propose to discuss, but where are we to seek for our criteria? For myself, I have been in the habit of discussing that subject in this way. These are to be found, in the first place, in the constitution of the human soul, and second, in the facts that constitute the environment of men. I do not say which is below the other. I do say that a serious mistake will be made by that pedagogist who leaves out either of these or gives either a very inferior position. As to how either presupposes the other, that is a very important question, but I cannot discuss it at more length.

Now as to the process of isolation--the first process of knowledge is to isolate things. We have certainly been taught that the first process of the mind is not a synthetic, but an analytic process. Every person coming into this hall took a view of it as a whole, and then began to isolate this thing from that, and then this process, after a time, ceased. But that there is to be no synthesis is a proposition which I do not understand to be in this report.

When a child comes to school you may divide the subjects which occupy his attention into two groups. The first are the elementary school arts,--as the improving of speech, the studies of reading, writing, drawing, and numerical calculations, if he has never entered upon these. They are not studies, they are the arts of the elementary school. We teach them, not for their own sake, but that they may be used as instruments. [Time called by the chairman, and extended by vote of the house.]

I wish, in the first instance, to express my sense of gratification. I felt that I was leaving the matter in a very imperfect form.

Now, I had said all that I care to say about the arts in the elementary schools. There are the studies, I mean the real studies, those we study for the purpose of getting out of them all that there is in them. Now, there is a discussion as to the relation in which the two classes of studies shall stand at the beginning. Now, the old idea was, that some of the first time in school should be devoted to these arts, and the studies were permitted to fall into the background, or perhaps fall clear out. Now, if I understand some of the pedagogists, their idea is to put the beginner at the real thing, or perhaps I should say to keep him at the real thing, that the arts should be acquired during the studies. Now, the question occurs to me, whether, in the elementary schools, these arts can ever be successfully taught when we are pretending to teach something else? I must say that if the object were to have a pupil advance the greatest distance for the first three months or six months, you had better say nothing about the arts at all. But we put him at the arts, knowing that when we put these gifts into his hands we are giving him an instrument of power that he will be able to use throughout his whole life. [Applause.]

Now, the question of concentration, so-called, is involved in this matter. I want to ask the question, and I would discuss it if I had a quarter of an hour,--I want to ask the question, how far it is possible to do two things in an intense manner at the same time. When I was superintendent of schools, a gentleman picked off the table a so-called physiological reader, and, looking at the title page, said, “For one, I could never teach physiology as a subject and reading as an art at the same time. The physiology is not and it cannot be made a proper material for a school reading book; a proper school reading book cannot be made a good physiology.” Yet I believe in concentration, if it means letting one subject assist and enforce another. I hope none of the brethren will become so enthusiastic as to assume that the whole round of information can be brought under the teaching of one subject. [Applause.]

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DR. E. E. WHITE, _Columbus, O._: I have a little hesitation in speaking on this question, where I am only a learner. I am anxious to know what my young friends mean. I hope I shall get the correlation of their ideas in time. [Laughter.]

As it seems to me, correlation, as a distinctive method, assumes to do more than it is possible for a method to accomplish. In my judgment, there is no one method of education, whether it be Herbartian or otherwise. To assume that a human soul is to be exclusively educated by the Herbartian method is a great assumption. I do not believe that we are to supplement and supplant now all that has been known in the education of the young based on the psychology which the defenders of this method are willing to discard. There are many of its methods we are willing to accept, but the Herbartian pedagogy is based on the Herbartian psychology, and if you discard that, you have no system of pedagogy, but you have many elements which you can utilize. Now, we make a mistake when we assume that there is only one method by which the young man in college and the children can be educated. The lady who spoke last night, Miss Arnold, had not such an idea. Now there is a blending in the primary grades which is not possible in the upper grades. That is emphasized completely in what we call the special courses in colleges. That blending may be on mere surface relations which will be discarded as soon as we pass above the primary grades. While we may concede that this is possible in one exercise, it is not possible in higher instruction. Our methods change, so let as not be too sweeping, too confident in our terms. Further, I think that Dr. Harris is entirely right in the position he has taken as to the meaning of coördination or correlation. He uses the term correlation, not only in its scientific, but in its recognized pedagogic sense. Concentration is a different process, and should receive separate consideration. May I add that the views I recently presented under what is called concentration seem to make class instruction impossible. They lead clearly to the one conclusion, that every child should be taught as an individual, by himself, and this means that all class instruction is to be given up. Individual instruction can alone meet the conditions assumed to be essential by concentration, as explained. What does this involve?

There have been many scholars since the Flood,--scholars who have honored learning and widened its domain. How were they produced? Not by any one method, and certainly not by “concentration.” These hosts of scholars cannot be accounted for on any such assumption, for they were produced under very unlike systems of elementary training. The history of school education shows that we are not shut up to a diet of pedagogic hash on the one hand, or one of baked beans on the other. There is clearly no one universal method or process in education by which alone a human soul is to be brought to power.

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DR. NICHOLAS MURRY BUTLER, _Columbia College, New York_: This is an interesting and exciting field of battle; it has not been a Bull Run, and it is manifestly not an Appomattox. But let us be fair, and let us discuss the question that is presented by this report. I shall spend no time in eulogizing this report. I do say that such a report, presented at this time, dealing with this specific topic in these words, is little less than a misrepresentation.

Such a document as this, presented at this particular time in the history of our educational development, and supposed to deal with the practical problem of the correlation of studies, is extremely unfortunate. This discussion has made it plain that there is among us a difference of opinion as to what the term “correlation of studies” means. This report interprets it to mean the correlation between the studies of the school curriculum and the intellectual environment of the pupil. Certainly that is not what the term is taken to mean in our current educational literature and in our current educational discussions. It has been claimed on this platform that those who use the phrase “correlation of studies,” in reference to the interdependence of school subjects one with another, are making a strained and improper use of the word. This criticism is not correct. The highest authority that we have, the “Century Dictionary,” gives as a definition of correlation, “the act of bringing into orderly connection or reciprocal relation.” It recites a passage from the great work of Grove, who first made this term familiar in English scientific literature, in illustration of the meaning of correlation. This is precisely the sense in which the word is used by Dr. McMurry and others, and it is precisely the sense in which we expect to find it used in this report. Therefore, I say I am disappointed, and grievously disappointed, that we have in these pages only a passing reference to the real problem of correlation or concentration as it is before American teachers at the present moment.

I can find no fault with the use of the word selected by the Committee, but I do complain that they have not treated the problem, whatever name they choose to give to it, that we asked them to solve. Instead of that, they have given us a splendid and learned discussion of educational values, an analysis of the history of the school curriculum, and an elaborate defence of the _status quo_. It is apparent to me, therefore, that this report faces backward and forward. I Bay this despite the fact that it suggests and argues for more than one important innovation in the curriculum.

For one hundred years, ever since the time of Pestalozzi, we have been trying to extract the curriculum from a philosophical discussion of this sort, but we have not succeeded in satisfying ourselves wholly. We have made great advance, and for that advance we in America are indebted more largely to Dr. Harris than to any other single person, living or dead. He has taught us to understand why certain specific branches of knowledge are selected for a place in the curriculum, and now we ask him to tell us how they are to be correlated, or coördinated, or concentrated, in practice, to meet the new demands that are made upon the school, and we get no answer in this report.

The curriculum that this report recommends to us, and the methods that it outlines, are arrived by an analysis made from the adult point of view. Are we, then, to understand that child study is to be given no hearing? Are we shut up to formal analysis as the sole method in evolving a practical school plan? The newer education answers this question directly in the negative. It is putting the child in the place of honor and asking him to tell us what his nature demands and in what order it demands it. Dr. White has said that the legitimate result of this newer movement is individualism in teaching. I agree with him absolutely. We hope that the time will come when the individuality of every child will be respected. We want to rescue each child from the thraldom to which the formalism of the schoolroom has subjected him. For the sake of system we are reducing fifty, sixty, or seventy individual children in a schoolroom to a common denominator. It is true that there is no universal educational method, and that the Herbartians are as little likely as the Hegelians to provide us with a rule that shall know so exception. But in the point of view that they take, based upon the doctrine of apperception and upon the doctrine oi interest, they are absolutely right, and it is not what we expected from a committee of this kind to find this entire movement turned out of court without a hearing. Personally I am a slavish adherent of no school of thought and wear the badge of none, but I do say that we should not be prevented from giving to this great Herbartian movement prolonged and sympathetic examination. Why is it that we find the question of the correlation or the concentration of studies forced upon us at all? Certainly the normal child-mind sees the world about it as a correlated and concentrated whole. It is the adults and philosophers who have made the analysis that has resulted in separating what to the child is connected; so that, after all, the advocates of correlation are simply endeavoring to put the subjects of study back where they found them and to treat the curriculum from the child’s point of view. The adult is able to distinguish a physical fact from a chemical fact, a geographical fact from an historical fact, an arithmetical fact from an algebraical fact, but the child is not. He views them all simply as facts, and originally they are all on the same plane with regard to his intelligence. We must, therefore, seek the real unity that underlies the curriculum, and not proceed by making first an artificial separation of studies, and then a doubly artificial synthesis of them.

A preceding speaker has sharply criticised the psychology of Herbart. It is undoubtedly true that we cannot accept Herbart’s psychology as a satisfactory explanation of mental life. But it is not necessary that we should do so in order to secure the benefit of the educational theory and the educational practice that bears Herbart’s name.

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