EXPERIMENTS IN PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

DIFFICULT as it is to experiment in education, the hope of educational progress lies largely in the schools that are bold enough to try new methods and new programmes. There should be no antagonism to their efforts and proposals, but cordial support and sympathy, assuming, of course, that their experiments are well considered. Those schools, both private and public, that may be called "progressive" have behind them a definite body of theory, already well elaborated and tested in part by other means. Their endeavor to put that theory into practice promises much for our whole educational procedure.

Progressive education everywhere seeks to substitute for the artificial exercises of the school the realities of life. Instead of the compulsions and routines of a system designed for drill alone, these schools seek to enable children to learn in the process of purposeful action. How to accomplish this and yet to ensure genuine accomplishment of recognized value is the problem such schools must solve. They seek to stimulate the growth of the individual as a whole, not merely to force him to learn a certain set of subjects; yet they do not wish to sacrifice learning nor to fail to establish habits and skills known to be desirable. A new technic of teaching and a fuller and better-balanced programme of education may well result from such experiments.

Unfortunately, we have as yet but few truly experimen

tal schools, and with rare exceptions these are not regarded with approval and understanding by the rank and file of teachers. Experimental education, moreover, is still left largely to the initiative of private effort. The essays in this section should arouse interest and stimulate new endeavor in this field.

A BOYS' SCHOOL IN UTOPIA

A UTOPIAN

THERE exists a widespread complaint against the kind of workman turned out by our American educational system. People have been looking in vain to see the universities which they have cherished at the expense of millions of dollars turn out scholars and statesmen of the first rank. They recognize great ability, great power, and great learning, but not inspiration. Perceiving at the same time a pernicious spread of luxury in a generation whose proportion of indolent persons is great, they begin to doubt the wisdom of their investment.

The schools and colleges meanwhile have been made aware of their shortcomings by a constant fire of criticism, dating from I don't know how far back. A well-todo parent finds his son at twenty-four years old running errands on State Street. He turns to the private school which his son attended and asks, “Why did you teach my boy Latin, French, and German, and make him read the first three books of Paradise Lost, and Dryden's Palamon and Arcite? Look at him now doing arithmetic from morning till night; and it will be two years at least before he is any use on 'the street.' You have not prepared him for life."

The justification given by the school for this young man's training has been twofold: first, that any work has the disciplinary virtue of all work, so that it does not much matter what the work is so long as it is work; second, when

the baffled parent has complained further, "But why should not you have provided work which fitted my son directly for the life he is going to lead, instead of work which fitted him for a life he is not going to lead?" the school has replied, "There will be time enough to learn the work which is to be done in later life, therefore now we offer those studies which result in culture; for the school should give a broader outlook than would be possible in preparing directly for a life's work."

Here is an antagonism between culture and drill. Both must have their due, but the school, in trying to meet the claims of each, tried to kill two birds with one stone. A means of obtaining culture, that is, the study of the classics, was applied to the use of drill in work, with the hope that culture would also be gained. Conjugations and declensions were made odious because there is poetry in Latin and Greek, and in the end the Iliad of Homer was used as a drudge. Is it strange that the boy came out with neither culture nor habits of work?

Hearing such criticism, the old-fashioned schoolmaster may explain that the natural scholar never finds fault with this method, while the boy to whom Homer is a drudge gets as much culture as he will get at all by being forced to work at the classics. He would have us know that all knowledge, especially all poetry not directly of our own time and nation, is enclosed by a tough husk, and until the young scholar is made to crack his husk, whether he wishes to or not, he cannot get the taste of the hidden meat; he therefore might as well learn to work in this way as in any other. There is undoubtedly truth in this view, and yet scarcely anyone is satisfied with the results, from the point of view either of culture or of work; and the heart of the matter is, that to use for drill what should be studied for its own truth and beauty is not culture. This fact vitiates the value of such material for drill as