SCHOOL ORGANIZATION AND INSTRUCTION 125 



for a time at the parting of the ways, and enables them during this 

 period of wavering to escape the stupidity of the schools, on the one 

 hand, and the heart-breaking conditions of business on the other. 



It was a bad day for education when it got itself placed over 

 against work; when it made work a penalty for the stupid and a 

 punishment for the perverse who would not allow education to be 

 breathed into them — and education is just finding out its colossal 

 blunder. Figures from the fourth grade up show that, when it is 

 solely a question of school or work, it is work that wins the contest, 

 hands down. Of the hosts that enter the primary grade, practically all 

 the children of all the people, by far too small a per cent, finish the 

 eighth year; of these a still lesser per cent, go to the high school, and 

 beyond this there is scarcely more than a negligible minority. This 

 absorption of child-life by the world's work all takes place in the face 

 of modern educational theory, our advanced views of culture, our legal 

 enactments, and the truant officer ! 



Any fair test applied to a school will show two things: first, that 

 the pupils are capable of far more productive work than is now called 

 for and, second, that they are anxious for more of it. This fall this 

 question was put to about two hundred. pupils from the sixth grade up: 

 If the building were open to you after school, would you like to stay 

 for extra work? What would you like to do and how much time 

 would you use? In the replies received all but twelve or fifteen said 

 they would like to stay from one half hour to two hours on from one 

 to four days a week. The range of choice was practically all among the 

 arts and crafts. Work in the wood shops was most popular, there 

 being about sixty applicants for this, while work in metal, in clay, in 

 textiles, bookbinding, printing, gymnastic dancing, photography and 

 many others had a strong following. 



Yet education is not wholly a matter of tasks. This is the pitfall 

 that catches most of our critics who contrast the old with the new. If 

 education were the result of tasks arbitrarily imposed; and if the old 

 set tasks for the pupils that were difficult enough to hold them to the 

 top notch of effort; and if the new levied only those that were so easy 

 that the pupils became dawdlers, then the apostles of the present 

 regime in school would have it their own way. But here is the differ- 

 ence that is world wide. The new, while rejecting the idea of imposing 

 tasks arbitrarily, seeks to establish conditions which challenge the 

 personal initiative. The old over-emphasizes attainment as a quanti- 

 tative result : The new values attainment only as it represents a quality 

 of mind that has acted through its own initiative. The old recognized 

 as training and discipline the so-called voluntary attention which 

 seemed to be mainly the ability to stare, ox-like, a disagreeable, unin- 

 teresting or unintelligible thing out of countenance. The new believes 



