Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/290

286 know they can strike a more or less popular chord when they denounce prevailing tendencies in teaching, so they ridicule prevailing methods and praise those of bygone days. It has become a sort of fashion now for certain newspapers, when they find themselves short of other material, to run something on "fads and frills in the schools."

Recently an editor printed a series of articles on the schools in a western city. He said they were being "honeycombed with fads and notions." When asked to name a conspicuous "fad" in the schools, he replied with general statements, but without hitting the mark once in his criticisms. He was asked whether the teaching of history was a "fad." "Of course not," he said. "Is the reading of English classics a 'frill'?" "No." "Or the teaching of children to sing a few minuutesminutes [sic] every day?" "This is all right, too." "Is it a 'notion' to teach them to express themselves through drawing?" He thought this was proper for most children, at any rate. "Is it wrong to have some memorizing of literary gems every day?" "No, this should be practised more than it is." "Where then are the 'fads?'" Apparently he realized he was in a tight place; and yet it was impossible to keep him from declaiming on the more thorough teaching of spelling, arithmetic, etc. The fact is this man, and there are others like him, had only a vague knowledge of the thing he was writing about. Unfortunately this writing tends to corrupt the minds of the people, and so to render it all the more difficult to secure educational evolution in response to the demands of the times.

It ought to be said at this point that the majority of laymen and a good proportion of teachers do not view the subject of educational values in any critical way whatever. The very fact that grammar, say, has been long taught in the elementary school is a sufficient guarantee for such people of its superior worth, and especially since they were taught the subject themselves. Most people settle the question of values in education much as they settle any problem of dress or of household management—they consider that to be right and best which is in general practcisepractice [sic], and which they have been accustomed to themselves. As a rule, though not always, the non-expert in education (and the principle holds for other interests) is conservative. He dislikes reform in studies or methods, because he can keep himself better adapted to a permanent and stable than to a changing order of things. However, this is not likely to be true in respect to the particular interest in which he is most vitally concerned, as in manufacturing, say, where the keenest sort of competition makes him realize that if he does not alter his methods to meet new conditions he will be crushed by his competitors. Keen necessity makes him dynamic, aggressive, radical. But in all those interests which he touches only incidentally, as it were, in which he does not feel serious competition, he often seems incapable of appreciating that progress is necessary, or even desirable. So in