EDUCATION 



1939 



EDUCATION 



indicated by his interests and desires. Perhaps 

 its most important principle is that all learn- 

 ing that is to be at all effective must be based 

 upon the child's own experience, and that any 

 attempt to force the child to master something 

 for which he has no basis of understanding or 

 interpretation in his own life is a waste of 

 time and effort. Hence one of the important 

 problems that modern education has attempted 

 to solve is this problem of providing rich, con- 

 crete, individual experiences with actual situa- 

 tions and actual objects, as a basis for the 

 systematic, "abstract" study. 



The old-time school placed a book in the 

 child's hands and forced him to memorize its 

 contents with little reference to whether the 

 words were really understood or not. Very 

 frequently the words were not understood, and 

 the "learning" became nothing but a parrotlike 

 repetition of meaningless symbols. One finds 

 in our schools of to-day occasional instances 

 of this barren and fruitless attempt at "educa- 

 tion," but the better schools condemn such 

 practices, and good teachers make it their first 

 business to see to it that children have a basis 

 in actual experience for the knowledge they 

 must acquire. Sometimes the objects that are 

 being studied about are brought into the 

 schoolroom; sometimes the children make ex- 

 cursions to the objects; the sand table and the 

 molding board are used to reproduce in minia- 

 ture actual situations; and when other forms 

 of illustration are not available, pictures are 

 liberally employed. The effort always is to 

 give the child actual experiences, and, failing 

 this, to stimulate his imagination to the point 

 where he can gain an adequate notion of what 

 the actual things are like, and of how he might 

 act if he were face to face with them in an 

 actual situation. 



What Educational "Experience" Means. It 

 is this insistence upon real experience, then, 

 that most clearly distinguishes modern educa- 

 tion from the education of the old-time school. 

 And the word experience is coming to have a 

 wider and a richer meaning as the modern 

 teacher works with the problem. When the 

 futility of having children memorize words 

 that had little or no meaning to them was 

 first recognized, some educators thought the 

 difficulty could be overcome merely by having 

 objects to illustrate the words. For example, 

 if children were studying about spheres and 

 pyramids, it was thought sufficient to have 

 actual spheres and pyramids to be looked at 

 and handled ; if dogs were to be studied, a real 



dog could be brought in; if the child was to 

 understand what a "bushel" meant, he should 

 look at and perhaps handle a bushel measure. 

 This, indeed, was a marked advance over the 

 parrotlike repetition of words, but after all it 

 did not solve the problem of giving the pupil 



Brazil 

 Bolivia 

 Colombia 

 Mexico 

 RrtoRico 

 Argentina 

 Chile 

 Cuba 

 Canada 

 United 

 States 



10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 



Per cent of 

 Illiteracy in the Americas 



Brazil, all ages, unable to write. 

 Canada, over 5, unable to write. 

 Colombia, males, all ages, unable to read. 

 Mexico, over 12, unable to write. 

 Porto Rico, over 10, unable to write. 

 Chile, over 10, unable to read. 

 Cuba, over 10, unable to read. 

 Bolivia, over 7, unable to write. 

 United States, over 10, unable to write. 



"real experiences." Gradually, as teachers 

 struggled with the task, an essential truth 

 emerged: if an object is really to mean any- 

 thing to the child it must have some connection 

 with a vital "problem" which he has a strong 

 desire to solve. 



One may learn something about pyramid* 

 and spheres by looking at nicely-fashioned 

 wooden models of these objects; one may learn 

 something about dogs by looking at real dogs; 

 and one may learn something about a bushel 

 by looking at an empty bushel-measure. But 

 one learns much more about these things if 

 they have a definite relation to a life-problem. 

 What dogs can eat, what must be done for 

 them in the way of shelter and training, what 

 precautions are to be taken if they are not to 

 be carried away by the dog-catcher and incar- 

 cerated in the "pound" these matters become 

 of large significance and "meaning" if the child 

 owns a dog of which he is very fond, and the 

 protection and care of which may be made to 

 appeal to him as a "real problem." 



It is, of course, very difficult for the teacher 

 or the parent to relate all of the knowledge and 

 skill that the child must master to some real 

 problem that is significant to the child's own 

 life. Modern education has not thus far de- 

 creed that all knowledge must be passed on in 

 this way. It has, however, set a high sanction 

 upon teaching through "problems," and it has 

 strongly insisted that the early basis of all 



