THE SCHOOL MUSEUM 1 



By GRANT SMITH, Chicago Teachers' College, Chicago, 111. 

 I. WHY THE SCHOOL MUSEUM JS DEMANDED 



A few weeks ago at the Mobile meeting of superintendents, 

 a speaker referred to what he called the failure in school organ- 

 ization and the failure in book knowledge. It does not seem so 

 much a question of failure as of inadequacy to the present situa- 

 tion. Systems and methods efficient for our parents or for our 

 own childhood are today actually ineffectual with the children of 

 the city. We find an explanation of this fact in the peculiar limi- 

 tations and shortcomings of city life. Book education was fairly 

 satisfactory in the boyhood of Washington and Lincoln, because 

 the less artificial conditions under which they lived furnished 

 countless informal, unconsciously educative experiences in life 

 outside the school; and the same thing has been proved in the 

 case of many of those here present. Book knowledge in itself 

 does not fail. It is merely insufficient unless it has a broad 

 foundation of rich experiences, in which case it then rapidly 

 assists the learner to interpret and organize and recreate his ex- 

 periences into real and personal knowledge. Neither does the 

 modern school organization fail in communities in which the life 

 of the children outside the school is made rich by learning the 

 primitive arts and by free intercourse with nature. It is the 

 narrowness, the one-sidedness, the dearth of adequate outside 

 experience which nullifies much of our effort in the cities. Whit- 

 tier's "Barefoot Boy" was not vitally in need of a school museum 

 as a part of the organization in his education. The great out-of- 

 doors,, the home, and the primitive community complete in itself 

 were his museum. If he gained, in addition to this very natural 

 form of education, the art of reading, of writing, of numbers, 

 and a little book interpretation of nature, the "Barefoot Boy" was 

 on the highroad to efficiency and power. Book knowledge is 

 only one of the wheels in the complex machinery of the efficient 

 life. In the past, the schools had only the comparatively simple 

 task of helping the children to organize and interpret their own 

 rich, home-gained experiences. But because the children of the 

 cities are cut off from the most of these educative activities, the 

 modern city school has before it the additional and difficult task 



a Read before the Chicago Nature-Study Club at the annual meet- 

 ing, March 4, 1911. 



