Chapter 11

THE AIM OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOL

During the past thirty years no part of our educational system has received so much attention as the Elementary Schools of the country. If we compare the condition of things which prevails at the present time with that which existed previous to 1870, there can be no doubt that a great advance has been made both in the better provision of the means of education and in the efficiency of the instruction given. Previous to 1870 a large number of the children of the poor received no education.[39] Of those attending school many left with but a scanty knowledge. Now practically every child[40] receives a training in the primary arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic; and with the gradual extension of the period during which the child must attend school, it has become possible to ensure that a larger and larger number of children leaving our Elementary Schools have received an education which may be of value for the after-fulfilment of the simpler practical ends of life. Again, previous to 1870 the school buildings were in many cases unfit for their purpose; now the Elementary Schools of the country both in their building arrangements and equipment are as a rule much superior to the voluntary and endowed schools providing secondary education. Previous to 1870 anyone was thought good enough to undertake the work of teaching; since that time more and more attention has been paid to the qualifications of the teacher and to securing that he shall have attained a certain standard of education, and have received a certain measure of training before engaging upon the work of the instruction of the young. We, _e.g._, no longer entrust the instruction of the younger children in the school to the older, as was the custom under the monitorial system of Bell and Lancaster, and with the abolition of the pupil-teacher the last remnant of a system introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the only remedy to meet the dire educational necessities of the time, will have been removed.

But in spite of the great advances which have been made, there is a deep-seated feeling now beginning to find expression, that somehow or other the Elementary School has not realised all the expectations that were once thought likely to result from the universal education of the children of the nation, and that in particular the Primary School has failed to foster and to establish the moral and social qualities necessary for the welfare of a State whose government is founded on the representative principle.

This, it seems to me, is largely due to the wrong conception of the aims which the Primary School is intended to realise--a conception which prevailed for many years after the introduction of compulsory elementary education. For some time now, and especially during the past few years, a counter-reaction has set in against the narrowness of the aims of the preceding period, and like all reactions it tends to go to the opposite extreme, and so to broaden the aims of the Primary School as to be in danger of failing to realise efficiently any one of the ends which it sets before it.

The state of things immediately preceding 1870 not unnaturally gave rise to the idea that the acquisition of the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic was the one indispensable object to be attained in the elementary education of the child. This conviction was strengthened by the system of Government grants introduced into both English and Scotch schools, payments to school managers being largely based upon the successes obtained in passes in the three elementary subjects.

Certain results naturally followed. In the first place, no provision was made for the special education of the infant classes. Since the after-success of the child was measured by his attainments in the three R's, the sooner the infant mind was introduced to these subjects the better the after-result might be expected to be. Thus the grant-earning capacity of the child became the teacher's chief consideration. In the second place, the energies of the teacher were directed to secure a certain mechanical accuracy in the use of the three elementary arts rather than their intelligent apprehension. As a consequence, these subjects came in time to be thought of as subjects worthy of attainment for their own sake and their acquisition as an end in itself. Hence it was forgotten that the acquisition and organisation of these systems of elementary knowledge are only valuable because they are the indispensable means of all intercourse, of all commerce, and of all culture. Hence also their use as instruments for the after-realisation of many purposes in life tended to be neglected, or at least to fall into the background. Individual teachers, no doubt, in many cases realised the partial error in this conception of the aims of the Primary School, but the demands of Government inspectors and of school authorities, with their rule-of-thumb methods of testing the success of the teacher's work by the percentage of passes gained, tended often to make the teacher, in spite of his better judgment, look upon the child mainly as a three-R grant-earning subject and to consider the chief aim of primary education to be the securing of a certain mechanical proficiency in the use of the three elementary arts.

Under such a method of examination it was certainly necessary for the teacher to pay some attention to the individuality of the child. If his efforts were to be at all successful it was incumbent upon him to discover as early as possible the range of the child's previous knowledge in the three grant-earning subjects and to find out in which of the three the power of acquisition of the child was naturally weak or naturally strong. Where the number of children in a class was large, little individual attention could, of course, be paid to the child, and in such cases the acquisition of the subject was aided by the mechanical drilling of sections of the class and by recourse to all manner of devices for ensuring the accurate acquisition of the essential subjects.

As a result of this partial and one-sided conception little attention was paid to the use to which these subjects may be put in the realisation of the practical ends of life. Arithmetic, _e.g._, seemed to the child to be made up of a number of kinds of arithmetic, each process having its own rules and methods of procedure; but it never entered into his mind, and but seldom into that of his teacher, that the various arithmetical processes are at bottom but diverse forms of the one fundamental process of adding to or subtracting from a group. Proportion was one kind of arithmetic, simple interest another, but that these processes symbolised real group-forming processes, or that they had to do with any of the realities of life, was apprehended, if at all, in the most imperfect and hazy manner.

In a similar manner, the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties of language construction occupied the major portion of the attention of the child during the school period, and the function of language in conveying a knowledge of things and persons and events received but a small share of his attention. Meanings of words were indeed tabulated and learnt by heart, and as a rule the child on examination-day could make a fair show in deluding the inspector that the passage read was intelligently apprehended. In very much the same way, the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties of writing and the drilling of the child to form his letters in a uniform style received the chief share of the school-time devoted to the subject.

The interest and attention of the child having been thus mainly occupied in the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties involved in the learning of the three grant-earning subjects, and little attention having been paid to the use of these arts, it followed that upon the conclusion of the school period the child left the school without any real interests having been established as the result of the educative process.

Moreover, except in so far as by their teaching we may establish habits of order and of accuracy, the three elementary subjects in themselves possess no moral or social intent; hence unless we can make the child realise their value as instruments for the attainment of ends of social worth they in themselves fail to play any important part in the building up of character.

Let me put this in another way. We have defined education as the process of acquiring and systematising experiences that will render future action more efficient, or alternatively it is the process by which we organise and establish in the mind systems of ideas for the attainment of ends. But if we make the acquisition of these elementary arts ends in themselves, then it follows that the more efficient action we seek to realise is the more efficient manipulation of a number system or a language system. If, however, we realise that these arts are but means to the realisation of other ends, then we shall understand that it is the character of the latter which mainly determines the resulting character of the education given.

Partly to this erroneous conception of the real function of the elementary arts, and partly to another cause which we shall mention later, may be attributed the poor results which our Elementary School system has attained in the establishment of interests of moral and social worth. If, moreover, we realise how large a proportion of the children left and still do leave school at an early age, before such interests can be permanently established, and in some cases with anything but an adequate knowledge of the elementary arts necessary for all further progress, we may rather be astonished that so much has been done than so little.

But in the reaction against the narrowness and formalism of our early aims in elementary education, there is a tendency--a strong tendency--at the present time to go to the opposite extreme, and to make the elementary instrumental arts the vehicles for the fostering of real interests at too early a stage. This manifests itself on the one hand in the desire to make all instruction interesting to the child, and on the other to introduce the child prematurely to a knowledge of the real conditions of life, before he can have any intelligent understanding of these conditions. From the barrenness and formalism of the earlier period, we now have the demand made that the school should throughout take into account the real and practical necessities of life.

The former tendency--the tendency to make everything interesting to the child by lessening or minimising the mechanical difficulties and by endeavouring in every way to incite the child to become interested in the content of the lesson--is best exemplified by the character of the school books which we now place in the hands of our children. The latter tendency--the tendency to the premature use of the elementary arts--is exemplified by the craving to make our teaching of arithmetic practical and real from the very beginning.

In the former case, instead of endeavouring to make the process of language construction interesting in itself, we divert the child's attention from the acquiring and organising of the system of language forms to the premature acquirement of the content of language. What results is obvious: the main interest being in the content, the interest in the mechanical construction of the form suffers, and as a consequence the child never attains a full mastery over the instrumental art.

In the latter case we attempt to do two things at the same time in our teaching of arithmetic. In every concrete application of arithmetic there are two interests involved: in the first place, there is the number interest--the interest in the analysing and recombining of a group, undertaken for the sake of the reconstruction itself; in the second place, there is the business or real interest, which the number interest indeed subserves, but the two interests are in no case identical. If we attempt to teach the two together, we as a rule teach both badly. The pupil will have but a hazy idea of the business relation, and will run the risk of imperfectly organising the pure number system. Hence all kinds of impossible problems may be given to the child without raising any suspicion of error in his mind, and such cases furnish certain evidence that the business relation does not really concern him, but that his whole attention is engaged with the purely constructive aspect of number. Another example of the same error of confounding two separate things is the "blind mixture we make of arithmetic and measuring." Because arithmetic is involved in all measuring we assume that when the child can add together feet and inches, therefore he has a complete knowledge of these spatial magnitudes. But manifestly, if spatial magnitude is to be taught intelligently, it must at first be taught independently of the number relation, which is a general system instrumental in the realisation of many concrete interests.

From these considerations, certain general results follow. On the one hand, the earlier conception of the aim of the Primary School as being mainly concerned with the acquirement and organisation of the three elementary arts as ends in themselves must be condemned. Language and number systems are means to the realisation of certain concrete ends of after-life, and the school during the later stages of education must endeavour to lead the child to perceive how these systems may be utilised in the furtherance of these real concrete interests. On the other hand, the attempt to combine prematurely these two aims will result in the imperfect attainment of both. During the earlier stages of education the main interest must be in the construction for its own sake of the language system or the number system, and while the real interest may be introduced it must always be kept subsidiary to the main interest--must first of all be taught for its own sake, and the instrumental art only used for its furtherance in so far as the acquirement of the former is not obstructed. _E.g._, the placing of geography and history Readers in the hands of the child while he is still struggling with the difficulties of language construction can only result in the history and geography being imperfectly understood and the organisation of the language system being delayed and hindered.

Once the elementary and subsidiary systems have been fairly well organised and established, their function as means for the furtherance of real interests should occupy a larger share of the child's attention and of the time of the school. These real interests, however, must in every case and at every stage be taught at first for their own sake, and thereafter their relation to the instrumental art explained and applied. Gradually, as they become better organised and more firmly established, the elementary arts occupy a smaller and smaller share of attention, until finally they function automatically, and the whole attention can be directed to the furtherance of the real interests to which the elementary arts are the indispensable means.

Hence we note three stages in the elementary education of the child--the stage preceding the formal instruction in the elementary arts; the stage in which the formal instruction should predominate and receive the greater share of the child's attention; the stage in which the elementary systems having been in great measure organised and established, they may be utilised as means to the furtherance of the real interests. The first stage corresponds to the Infant or Kindergarten age: here the main object is to build up in the mind of the child systems of ideas about the things of his environment; to extend, by conversation and by reading to the child, the vocabulary of his own language; to give him practice in the combining and recombining of concrete groups of things, and to introduce him to a knowledge of the various language forms in a concrete shape.

In the second stage, and here the work of the Primary School begins, the main emphasis at the beginning must be laid on the acquirement and establishment of the language and number systems for their own sake. If right methods are followed, the child can be interested in these processes of construction without the need of calling into use at every point some real interest. In the concluding stage the use of these instruments as means to the realisation of the simpler practical ends of life should receive more attention.

One reason, then, for the poor moral and social results effected in the past by our Elementary School system has been the undue emphasis placed upon the acquisition of the merely formal arts to the neglect of the real interests to which the former are but the means. Another cause, however, has been operative in producing this negative result. In the Elementary Schools, in the past, little attention has been paid to the individuality of the child, and little heed given to the differences between children as regards their different rates of intellectual growth and their differing aptitudes for various branches of study. Under a system of classification which compelled each individual, whether intellectually well or moderately or poorly equipped, to advance at an equal rate, attention to the individual with any other aim than to raise the weak to the standard of the average child in acquiring the three R's was impossible. Again, our huge city schools, partly on account of their vast size, partly on the ground that they are unable to organise school games, partly on account of their lack of any common school interests, do not and cannot foster any sense of a corporate life, any feeling of a common social spirit. Where our English Public School system is strong, our Elementary and sometimes even our Day Secondary School systems are weak. If the home fails to foster these qualities, and the school does not or cannot fill the gap, then as a rule we turn out our boys and girls poorly equipped to fulfil their duties in after-life as members of a corporate community and as citizens of a State. Mere teaching of history or of civics in our schools will do little to attain this end, unless by some method or other we can foster by means of the school-life the real civic spirit. It is, of course, easy to point out the nature of the disease; it is more difficult to prescribe a remedy. But much might be done to strengthen and increase the moral influence of the school by a better system of classification, which took into account the differences in intellectual capacity and in natural aptitude, and which as a consequence, in the education of the child, paid more attention to each child's individuality. This would involve much smaller classes than exist at present, and would further involve that the children should be under the care of one teacher for a longer time than is now the rule. At the present time, in many cases, the teacher is employed in teaching the same subjects, at the same stage, year after year, to a yearly fresh batch of sixty or seventy children. Consequently he learns to look upon his pupils as mere subjects to whom must be imparted the required measure of instruction. Of the children in themselves, of their home-life, of their interests outside school, he knows nothing, and as a rule cares less.

If in addition to this we ceased erecting barracks for the instruction of children and erected schools for their education, we should make even a further advance in this direction. If it is impossible for other reasons to lessen the size of our city Elementary Schools, then the remedy lies in the division of the schools into departments in which the Head should be entrusted with the supervision of the education of the children during several years. In this way it would be possible for the teacher to get to know each child individually, to direct his education in accordance with his aptitudes, and to exert an influence over him. Thus, by giving more attention to the organised games of the school and by the creation of school interests, much might be done to remedy the defects of the school on the side of moral and social education. At best, however, when the home fails, the Elementary School can do little, and we must put our trust in the ethical agencies of society to assist and promote the efforts of the school in the furthering of a right social spirit and in the creation of a common corporate feeling.

FOOTNOTES:

[39] _E.g._, in 1861 it was calculated that only 6 per cent. of the children of the poor in England were receiving a satisfactory elementary education. Cf. Balfour Graham's _Educational System of Great Britain and Ireland_, p. 14.

[40] _E.g._, in 1872 in Scotland school places were provided for only 8.3 per cent. of the population. In 1905 places were provided for 21.22 of the population. Cf. _Report on Scotch Education_, 1905, p. 6.