THE HOME AND THE SCHOOL 



O. F. Cook 



Bureau of Plant Industry, U. S. Department of Agriculture 

 Washington, D. C. 



The normal instinct of children is to 

 follow and imitate their parents, as of 

 parents to care for their children. 

 These are the fundamental educational 

 instincts that make human progress 

 possible through the accumulation and 

 transmission of experience from one 

 generation to another. Civilization is 

 the accumulated experience of the race. 

 Longer periods of infancy, childhood 

 and youth permit more experience to 

 be transmitted, and more advanced 

 stages of civilization to be attained. 

 Breaking the contacts between the 

 generations tends to subvert civiliza- 

 tion because the experience of children 

 kept by themselves does not go beyond 

 the stage of barbarism. The "youth 

 to youth principle" is invoked by some 

 educators in defending their system, 

 but is a dangerous fallacy that would 

 reduce all the children to the condition 

 of orphans in asylums, deprived of 

 normal contacts with parents and 

 elders. 



The basis of character and ability no 

 doubt is organic and hereditary, while 

 the individual attainment is a physio- 

 logical reaction of the organism to its 

 environment, and is determined very 

 largely by the early post-natal condi- 

 tions which our present educational 

 system almost completely disregards. 

 Germinal transmission of high intel- 

 lectual and social qualities is ineffective 

 if the full expression of the desirable 

 characters is prevented by unfavorable 

 environments or bad habits. Every 

 breeder of improved plants or animals 

 knows that favorable conditions must 

 be provided if the full development of 

 desirable characters is to be expected, 

 and that even the best stocks will show 

 inferior behavior under distress condi- 

 tions. 



How many children grow up under 

 conditions of full attainment of possi- 

 bilities? No farmer could afford to 

 raise a crop or keep a breed of cattle 

 with so large a proportion of failures. 



u /^NE father is better than a hundred 

 \^ schoolmasters. This was a prov- 

 erb before the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, and do we come out by any 

 other door today? Our vast, complex 

 system of education is failing to edu- 

 cate; twenty-five million boys and 

 girls are at last being standardized in 

 the schools of America with the pre- 

 cision and efficiency of a machine 

 shop ; they are primed with informa- 

 tion which is assembled just as a 

 Ford car is assembled, and the result 

 is becoming the nation's despair. 

 They know everything and have no 

 sense! Reformers run hither and 

 yon, but there is no ready-made 

 solution that will sove the problem. 

 The home undoes the day's lesson; 

 you must reach the parents; you 

 must educate the adult before you 

 can make any headway with the 

 child ; education must begin at 

 home, indeed, what is this conclusion 

 at which we are bringing up but that 

 One father is better than a hundred 

 schoolmasters?^' (The Villager, April 

 1922). 



One of the active reformers writes: 

 "The transmission of character and 

 ideals comes best from personal inti- 

 mate contact of maturity with imma- 

 turity, which only a small college can 

 furnish." 



Of the need of such contacts before 

 the college stage is reached, nothing 

 is said. Our pedagogues take it for 

 granted that children shall be born and 

 raised, and turned over as raw material 

 to be manufactured in educational in- 

 stitutions. Perhaps the basic fault of 

 our educational system is its failure 

 to recognize the home as the funda- 

 mental educational institution, and the 

 parents as the indispensable teachers. 

 The transmission of character and 

 ideals is a fact of human development 

 that needs to be studied from a biologi- 

 cal standpoint, no less than other forms 

 of transmission through the germ-cells. 



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