108 THE SCHOOL 



prolonged period of infancy in the human race lies at the foundation 

 of family life. President Butler defines our spiritual environment as 

 " the spiritual possessions or inheritances of the race." * These 

 spiritual inheritances he classifies as our scientific inheritance, our 

 literary inheritance, our artistic inheritance, our institutional inher- 

 itance, and our religious inheritance. As education is the work of 

 the school, it is obviously, then, its function to introduce the child 

 to his spiritual inheritances. As a recent writer has well expressed 

 the thought : " This production from within the mind of its own 

 world in response to the stimulating effects of the world without is 

 education as a process, as an activity. . . . What his race has 

 produced he (the youth) reproduces, and thus universalizes his 

 individual nature and socializes his private impulses." 2 



This philosophic view of education which calls, as far as may 

 be, for the reproduction in the individual of what has been produced 

 by the race, is responsible for large additions to the elementary 

 curriculum. At the same time, and in entire harmony with the 

 philosophic view, there has been a constantly growing demand on the 

 part of the people for the teaching of such subjects as carpentry, 

 sewing, and cooking. Hence there has arisen the problem of the 

 curriculum. Since we can teach but a small fraction of our spiritual 

 inheritances, on what principle shall we make the selections? How 

 shall we avoid giving teachers more to teach than they can teach 

 well, and pupils more to learn than they can learn well? How shall 

 we prevent what is popularly known as the " overcrowding " of the 

 elementary curriculum? 



Twenty-five years ago the average elementary school in America 

 taught reading, writing, spelling, grammar, geography, arithmetic, 

 United States history, and what was called civics. In order to fill in 

 the time, arithmetical rules of no possible use in life were taught, and 

 the children's wits were exercised or blunted by outlandish mathe- 

 matical puzzles; a manual of United States history and the Con- 

 stitution of the United States were learned by heart; long lists of 

 meaningless names were memorized in geography; parsing with 

 the utmost detail was continuous; drawing, where drawing was 

 taught, was exclusively from flat copies; and the crowning glory of 

 the school was held to be the ability to spell sesquipedalian words 

 whose signification had never dawned upon the childish intellect. 

 The lack of intelligence in this work is to be accounted for by two 

 facts: first, that teachers were not as well educated or trained as they 

 are to-day; and second, that in the absence of interesting subject- 

 matter they required their pupils to commit to memory dry and 

 useless details in order to fill up the prescribed time. The additions 



1 Butler, The Meaning of Education, p. 17. 



2 Home, The Philosophy of Education, p. 100. 



