Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/387

 COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION 381

According to this social program, the first line of work to be taken by teachers in training, should be a course in the history of education. This will be, not a course of the traditional kind, wherein a long series of historical events is considered. It will be a course, not for the pur- pose, primarily, of coming to know the history of education; but for the purpose of uncovering the roots of the present problems of educa- tion and getting a genuine perspective of those problems in their his- torical development. For, history is not ended, and we are not at the end. We are in the very midst of the history of education, with prob- lems all about us, with tasks all unfinished, and, if we could but see, with the need of programs and reconstructions that will run ahead into the far future.

The large problem of education is the making of new educational history. The real reason for studying the history of education is that one may learn how to become a maker of history. For this purpose, history must awaken the mind of the student to the problems, forces;, and conditions of the present; and its outlook must be towards the future. Such a course will have scientific validity in that it will seem to the student to be the consideration of real problems and it will make him more alert and awake to realities, not merely of the past, but of the present and the future. He will finish the course with a sense of the problems of education that he must meet.

Upon the basis of such a digging up of problems, it is possible to build up a course that will organize all these problems, institutions, forces, and conditions of the present into what will be a cross-section of the history of education, to be called "The Social Aspects of Edu- cation.** Here will be raised the questions of the social sources of the experiences of children; the nature of community life within which these experiences go on; the elements that may be lacking or exag- gerated in the life of the community; the relationships of our social in- stitutions to the development of intelligence in children ; the place of industry and the industrial organization; of play and the play life, of religion and religious institutions, and all the other social forces in the actual education of children.

It will raise the question as to the real work of the school in the light of its historical development, and in the midst of other social in- stitutions. It will develop the problem of the conmiunity*s own edu- tion, and the part that the conmiunity's general life plays in the educa- tion of its boys and girls. And it will, finally, develop the universal problem, ''why does so large a part of our school-inculcated intelligence fail to make any useful connections with the actual life of the com- munity ? "

This last question wUl set the problem for a third general introduc- tory ooxirse. That problem, stated more fully, is this : How can we de-

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