438 



NA TURE 



[August 22, 1907 



drifted, if \vc .nr- U) avert the consequences that must 

 overtalie us through having equipped our children for their 

 life-struggle with implements unfitted for their use, we 

 must consider afresh the fundamental ideas on which a 

 system of elementary education should be based. Instead 

 of excluding the child from contact with the outer world 

 we must bring him into close relationship with his 

 surroundings. It was given to man to have dominion 

 over all other created things, but he must first know 

 them. It is in early years that such knowledge is most 

 rapidly acquired, and it is in gaining it that the child's 

 intellectual activities are most surely quickened. 



It is unfortunate that we failed to realise this great 

 function of Elementary Education when we first essayed 

 to construct for ourselves a national system. The three 

 R's, and much more than that, are essential and in- 

 cidental parts of Elementary Education. But what is 

 needed is a Leitmotif — a fundamental idea underlying all 

 our efforts and dominating all our practice, and I venture 

 to think that that idea is found in basing our primary 

 education on practical pursuits, on the knowledge gained 

 from actual things, whether in the Field, the Workshop, 

 ur the Home. 



Instead of fetching our ideas as to the training to be 

 given in the people's schools from that provided in our 

 old grammar schools, we should look to the occupations 

 in which the great mass of the population of all countries 

 are necessarily engaged, and endeavour to construct 

 thereon a sj'steni with all such additions and improve- 

 ments as may be needed to adapt it to the varied require- 

 ments of modern life. By this process — one of simple 

 evolution adjusted to everyday needs — a national system 

 of education might be built up fitted for the nation as a 

 whole — a system founded on ideas very different from 

 those which, through many centuries, have governed the 

 teaching in our schools. In the practical pursuits con- 

 nected with the Field, the Workshop, and the Home, and 

 in the elementary teaching of science and letters incidental 

 thereto, we might lay the foundation of a rational system 

 of primary education. 



These three objects — the Field, the Workshop, and the 

 Home — should be the pivots on which the scheme of in- 

 struction should be fixed, the central thoughts determining 

 the character of the teaching to be given in rural and 

 urban schools for boys and girls. It was Herbart who 

 insisted on the importance of creating a sort of centre 

 around which school studies should be grouped with a 

 view to giving unity and interest to the subjects of in- 

 struction. I have elsewhere shown how a complete system 

 of primary education may be evolved from the practical 

 lessons to be learned in connection with out-door pursuits, 

 with workshop exercises and with the domestic arts, and 

 how, by means of such lessons, the child's interest may 

 be excited and maintained in the ordinary subjects of 

 school instruction, in English, arithmetic, elementary 

 science, and drawing. In the proposals I am now 

 advocating I am not suggesting any narrow or restricted 

 curriculum. On the contrary, I believe that, by widening 

 the child's outlook, by closely associating school work 

 with familiar objects, you will accelerate his mental 

 development and quicken his power of acquiring know- 

 ledge. I would strongly urge, however, that the child 

 should receive less formal teaching, that opportunities for 

 .self-instruction, through out-door pursuits, or manual 

 exercises, or the free use of books, should be increased, 

 so that as far as possible the teacher .should keep in vie\v 

 the process by which in infancy and in early life the 

 child's intelligence is so rapidly and marvellously stimu- 

 lated. Already we have discovered that our unscientific 

 attitude towards primary education has caused us to over- 

 look the essential difference between the requirements of 

 country and of town life, and the training proper to boys 

 and girls. Our mechanical methods of instruction, as laid 

 down in codes, make for uniformity rather than diversity, 

 and we are only now endeavouring^ by piecemeal change's! 

 In brmg our teaching somewhat more' closely into relation 

 with existmg needs. But the inherent defect' of our system 

 IS that we have started at the wrong end, and, instead 

 of evolving our teaching from the things with which the 

 child IS _alre,ndy familiar, and in which he is likely to find 

 his life s work, we have taken him away from those 



surroundings and placed him in strange and artificial con- 

 ditions, in which his education seems to have no necessary 

 connection with the realities of life. 



The problem of primary education is to teach by prac- 

 tical methods the elements of letters and of science, the 

 art of accurate expression, the ability to think and to 

 control the will ; and the ordinary school lessons should 

 be such as lead to the clear apprehension of the processes 

 that bring the child into intimate relation with the world 

 in which he moves. During the last few years the import- 

 ance of such teaching has dimly dawned upon our educa- 

 tional authorities, but, instead of being regarded as 

 essential, it has been treated as a sort of extra to be 

 added to a literary curriculum, already overcrowded. 

 What is known as manual training is to some extent 

 encouraged in our schools, but it forms no part of the 

 child's continuous education. It is still hampered with 

 conditions inconsistent with its proper place in the curri- 

 culum, and is uncoordinated with other subjects of in- 

 struction. Moreover, no connecting link has yet been 

 forged between the teaching of the Kindergarten and work- 

 shop practice in the school. We speak of lessons in 

 manual training as something apart from the school in- 

 struction, as something outside the school course, on the 

 teaching of which special grants arc paid. Twenty or 

 thirty years ago people used to tal'.c about " teaching 

 technical education," and from this unscientific way of 

 treating the close connection that should exist between 

 hand-work and brain-work our authorities have not yet 

 freed themselves. 



It is true we have long since passed that stage when 

 it was thought that the object of instruction in the use 

 of tools was to make carpenters or joiners; but, judging 

 from a report recently issued by the Board of Education, 

 it would seem that it is still thought that the object of 

 cookery lessons to children of twelve to fourteen years of 

 age is the training of professional cooks. Until the 

 Board's inspectors can be brought to realise that the aim 

 and purpose of practical instruction in primary schools, 

 whether in cookery or in other subjects, is to train the 

 intelligence through familiar occupations, to show how- 

 scientific method may be usefully applied in ordinary 

 pursuits, and how valuable manipulative skill may thus be 

 incidentally acquired, it does not seem to me that they 

 themselves have learned the most elementary principles 

 of their own profession. An anonymous teacher, writing 

 some weeks since in the Morning Post, said : " The 

 cookery class can be made an invaluable mental and moral 

 training ground for the pupils, the most stimulating part 

 of primary education. It teaches unforgettable lessons of 

 cleanliness and order, of quickness and deftness of move- 

 ments. The use of the weights and scales demands 

 accuracy and carefulness, and the raw materials punish 

 slovenliness or want of attention with a thoroughness 

 which the most severe of schoolmasters might hesitate 

 to use. Practical lessons in chemistry should form an 

 important feature of each class. . . . The action of heat 

 and moisture on grains of rice provides an interesting 

 lesson on the bursting of starch cells, and the children's 

 imagination is awakened by watching the hard isolated 

 atoms floating in milk change slowly to the creamy soft- 

 ness of a properly made rice pudding. The miraculous 

 change in the oily white of egg when it is beaten into a 

 mountain of snowy whiteness gives thimi interest in the 

 action of air and its use in cookery." 



Can the teaching of grammar or the analysis of sentences 

 provide lessons of equal value in quickening the intelli- 

 gence of young children? 



I must add one word before passing from this suggestive 

 illustration of the value of scientific method in the treat- 

 ment of educational quest'ons. We live in a democratic 

 age, and any proposed reform in the teaching of our 

 primary schools must be tested by the reouirement that 

 the revised curriculum shall be such as will provide not 

 only the most suitable preparatory training for the occupa- 

 tions in which four-fifths of the children will be sub- 

 sequently engaged, but will, at the same time, enable 

 them or some of them to pass without any breach of 

 continuity from the primary to the secondary school. 

 There must be no class distinctions separating the public 

 elementary from the State-aided secondary school. The- 



NO. tq;;- vriT,. 76] 



