The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MAY 31. THE SCHOOL OF TO-MORROW.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 315, 31 May 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MAY 31. THE SCHOOL OF TO-MORROW.

About three hundred articles have been submitted in response to the New York World's Work invitation of explanations of what the school will do for the boy and the girl of to-morrow in contrast with what the school did for the boy and girl of yesterday. There is a practical unanimity of opinion shown by these three hundred education writers, who range from college professors to teachers of country schools, that the school will get greater and greater emancipation from "method" and theory, will pay less heed to dogmas of "intellectual discipline" and memory work and examination tests and all such things, and that it will drive ahead more directly towards training the young for the life that they must lead and the work that they must do. The prevailing opinion is that nothing will be lost in this change. Intellectual discipline, culture and all the old aims will be directed in channels that more directly interest the young, and that much will fcc gained by making the school a part of life and not something apart from life. There is no mistaking this drift, which is strong enough to warrant being called an educational revolution. The old pedagogy has lost its fight against those who would make the school a more practical preparation for life. A schoolmaster of distinction and long experience whose aid was sought in making a judgment of these articles has drawn the following conclusions from his reading of them: Education was never, in America, so strictly taken to task as now. The bulk of the year's speeches and articles are more than mildly corrective, they are dissentient, remonstrative, iconoclastic. It is the school men themselves, from class teachers to State superintendents, who are railing at traditional usages. From the chairs of education in the colleges and the investigators of endowed foundations issue the most disconcerting suggestions that the time-worn assertions of old educational theorists do not stand the cold trial of statistical or investigative research,

Of tin; three hundred papers submitted to the World's Work by men and women teachers, school officials, physicians, settlement workers, and parents, practically every one attacks the schools of yesterday and concedes that the abuses exist little abated in the schools of today. The most frequent charges are: Too few brains used in meeting pre-sent-day problems; mental laziness content with unthinking subservience to education form, too much system, too much shell, too little meat, wooden methods, unlocated responsibility, no connection between good service and good play, local politics in management. Remarkable is the repetition that the boy or girl of to-morrow must be the centre of the school system; their natures, their capacities, their needs, determining what the school exercises shall be. The school shall be for John and Mary, It is not that, now. Every-essay takes up health, demanding it as primary, asserting it to be considered an afterthought in most school procedure to-day. The winner of the first.prize in the education contest was Mr. A. D. Dean, chief of the division of Trade Schools in the New York State Education Department. He thus describes how hi* own father went to the University of Hard Knocks. "My father sent me to a school of yesterday so much that I very nearly missed an education. It was this way: He had labored so hard to obtain what he called 'an education' that he was afraid I would be missing one,' if by any possible chance there was any let. up on the books. ' Somehow he forgot that his splendid health, his sanity of vision, his capacity for work and his wholesome attitude toward life resulted from a contact with other educational forces than the schoolhouse, and that the very hardships of his boyhood constituted in themselves an educative process. He held two degrees—M.C. (master of character) and M.I. (master of Industry) from what was then the largest fitting school n the land—the University of Hard Knocks. I suspect that it had a curriculum unrivalled by the schools which I attended. It began in a good New England home managed by thrifty and sterling parentage. Its course in farm chores had plenty of exercise and contact with Nature. Its spelling bees, husking parties, and church suppers furnished wholesome recreation. In fact, my father had in one way or another all the essentials of the school of to-morrow—physical and moral training, vocational education and direction, contact with nature and directive recreation. The school of to-morrow will have over its door, 'We conserve the whole boy.' The watchword of the school of yesterday has been, "We preserve the entire course or study.' Those who managed the schools of yesterday thought that children were created for the exemplification of the curriculum. In the schools of to-morrow the controlling motive will be that the curriculum' is arranged to serve the needs of the pupils. In place of machine operatives in the factory of instruction we shall have teachers who believe that they are rendering the right service when they teach boys and not merely subjects. I enquired once of a group of I teachers what they taught, One said mathematics; another replied English; still another science; but the fourth— j God bless the little prophetess—merely said, 'Please, sir, just boys.' The school of to-morrow, standing for health and joy in labor, will not have its work interrupted by an excess of holidays and vacations. In-fact, the educative process will be so wisely distributed between the work done in the school and the home that every day will be both a holiday and a work day, the school simply adapting its occupations to the requirements of the season. In the school of to-mor-row the teacher will be a master craftsman. He will be the artist and not the machine hand. He will take the human clay and fashion it into its various shapes rather than dump it in a common mould between the levers of tradition and uniformity. He will have before him as his model the image of the perfect man of to-morrow, sound, accomplished and beautiful in body; intelligent and sympathetic in mind; reverent in spirit, and productively efficient. The teacher and man-to-be-pupil will be ready to place these qualities at the service of the social purpose of to-mor-row. You ask what is this social purpose. It is the increase not alone of material, but of human wealth."