EDUCATION 



1934 



EDUCATION 



The New Relation Between Teachers and 

 Parents. Society as a whole, through its dele- 

 gated authority, selects the teacher, selects the 

 text-books, and determines the standards of 

 the school. The relationship between the mod- 

 ern school and the individual parent has be- 

 come more or less impersonal. Indeed, the 

 whole movement of parent-teachers associa- 

 tions of the present day is an expression of a 

 desire to restore this warm personal relation- 

 ship between the parent and the teacher (see 

 PARENT-TEACHER ASSOCIATION). In the United 

 States alone there are to-day nearly 700.000 

 teachers. It is estimated that there are more 

 than 100,000 vacancies each year, which means 

 that there are more than 100,000 teachers who 

 are new to their particular tasks. There are 

 also many thousands of teachers who propose 

 to stop teaching at the end of each year. 

 Among the other half-million teachers, many 

 have taught only one or two years. With all 

 these variations in experience and mental atti- 

 tude on the part of the teachers, it is small 

 wonder that there is great difficulty in deter- 

 mining proper standards of preparation of the 

 children throughout the grades. 



The Need for Standards of Achievement. 

 Among the many questions of standards which 

 arise are those in regard to the mental ex- 

 pectancy for children on entering a particular 

 grade. How much more should we expect 

 after a child has been in school one year, or 

 two years, or five years? How well do the 

 children add, read or write? How much history 

 should they know? These questions demand a 

 more adequate system of measurement than 

 the personal opinion of teachers with a limited 

 amount of experience and training. It is not 

 enough to say that the child is "poor" in 

 reading, or "good" in adding, or ''excellent" in 

 penmanship, unless we know something of the 

 standard of excellence .in the mind of the 

 teacher. It is not enough to ask whether or 

 not the child is "good," or "well-behaved," or 

 that his parents are "reasonable," or whether 

 the child "likes" the teacher. It is not enough 

 to report that the children "study" or that 

 they are "industrious." Now that society re- 

 quires that a parent place his child under a 

 particular teacher, in a particular school, it is 

 only right that he should know whether or not 

 teacher and school are efficient. 



As these questions have become more and 

 more insistent, the schools have come more 

 and more to demand means of measuring edu- 

 cational attainment ; means of measuring edu- 



cational progress; means of measuring teaching 

 efficiency. In answering these questions stu- 

 dents of the science of education have been 

 influenced by the great development of meas- 

 urements in other types of activity, as agri- 

 culture, medicine or business. 



With the introduction of cost accounting 

 systems on farms, in stores and in factories, it 

 is to be expected that the public will demand 

 a more definite system of school accounting, a 

 more adequate system of measurement of 

 educational results. As a matter of fact, the 

 demand for such measurements has been paral- 

 lel to the demand for measurement in all 

 other fields. 



Methods of Grouping Pupils. The attempts 

 to grade children in the schools which have 

 been made in recent years express the school 

 administrator's desire to measure the educa- 

 tional progress of children. Among the various 

 attempts at grouping children might be men- 

 tioned the scheme of grouping children on the 

 basis of age, size, years in school and mental 

 maturity. Certain attempts have been made 

 at grouping children of the same age together, 

 others of the same size, others of the same 

 number of years in school, others of the same 

 mental maturity. The seating arrangements 

 in the old-fashioned school furnished evidence 

 of the fact that children were not infrequently 

 sorted on the basis of size. The scheme of 

 grouping children in seven, eight or nine grades 

 on the basis of the number of years they have 

 been in school is a later attempt at a satis- 

 factory grouping. The present ideal is to group 

 children so as to have them of as nearly the 

 same degree of mental maturity as possible, 

 irrespective of the number of years in school, 

 or of size or age. 



Educators realize that children of the same 

 size are not necessarily of the same degree of 

 mental maturity. Neither are children v.'ho 

 have been in school the same number of years 

 of the same degree of mental maturity. In- 

 deed, the investigations which have been rnado 

 in recent years show marked variability in this 

 particular. The records in some cities show 

 that as many as seventy-five per cent of the 

 children have been unable to do the required 

 work in the allotted time. Modern educators 

 have provided adjustable seats so as to make 

 it possible to provide a flexible system of 

 seating. They have likewise attempted to 

 work out new schemes of promotion, such as 

 the semi-annual promotion, in order to pro- 

 vide an adaptable system of caring for the 



