Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/371

Rh he may be familiar with political discussions and able to make an intelligent choice between candidates and policies. The imparting of such knowledge to each individual is essential in a democratic nation, but it falls far short of the education needed to secure the highest efficiency of each unit of society. Still less does it mean that wretched travesty of education which would confine the work of the public schools to those exercises in reading, writing and ciphering which will enable a boy or a girl at the age of fourteen or earlier, to earn starvation wages in a store or factory. Education for efficiency means all of these things, but it means much more. It means the development of each citizen first as an individual and second as a member of society. It means bodies kept fit for service by appropriate exercise. It means that each student shall be taught to use his hands deftly, to observe accurately, to reason justly, to express himself clearly. It means that he shall learn 'to live cleanly, happily and helpfully, Math those around him'; that he shall learn to cooperate with his fellows for far-reaching and far-distant ends; that he shall learn the everlasting truth of the words uttered nearly two thousand years ago: 'No man liveth to himself' and e Bear ye one another's burdens.' Such, I take it, is the goal of American education.

If this ideal of developing the highest individual and social efficiency of each citizen is the goal of American education, obviously the curriculum of our schools becomes an object of extreme solicitude. Particularly is this the case with the elementary schools, for these contain over ninety per cent, of the children under instruction. During the last quarter of a century a great movement for the reform of the elementary curriculum has been gathering strength. The most prominent characteristics of this movement would seem to be the development of the imagination and the higher emotions through literature, and art, and music; the training of the body and the executive powers of the mind through physical training, play and manual training; and the introduction of the child to the sources of material wealth, through the direct study of nature and of processes of manufacture. At first the movement seems to have been founded on a psychological basis. To-day the tendency is to seek a sociological foundation—to adjust the child to his environment of man and of nature.

At various times during the past ten or fifteen years, and particularly during the past year, reactionary voices have been loudly raised against the new education, and in favor of the old. Such was to be expected. Reactions follow inevitably in the wake of every reform, political and social. Analysis will show that the reactionary tendencies in education arise from three chief sources:

1. The demagogic contentions of selfish politicians who see that it costs more money to teach the new subjects of the curriculum than the old, and that thus a large proportion of the public revenue is diverted