Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
It is hard for the uninitiated to understand that the grade, be it
high, middle, or low, is not associated with promotion and advancement
as in schools for normal children. On the contrary, it signifies the
quality and status of the individual, his limitations, his
possibilities, and consequently determines almost unfailingly the
training for his life work; not by any hard-and-fast lines, but by a
general mapping out of means which experience has proved will best
insure his development, because best suited to his needs. Every
latitude is allowed and, as the comfort of both the teacher and the
entire class depends upon each going to his own place, there is easy
and natural transference according to the necessity indicated by
either progress or retrogression; but the varied occupations in each
grade give ample scope for indulgence of individual proclivity in the
means of development, and it is found that the original diagnosis,
based upon experience, rarely errs.
The motto of the schools--"We learn by doing; the working hand makes
strong the working brain"--shows manual training to be the basis of
the scheme of development, varied for each grade to suit the
intelligence. Thus classified, various occupations are arranged and
presented with the double intent of securing all-round development,
and of giving at the same time opportunity for choice according to
individual bent, the child being gradually permitted to devote himself
more exclusively to that in which he shows a tendency to excel, and to
gain a certain automatic ease in what shall prove the initial of a
life employment. A knowledge of writing and of numbers is acquired
incidentally as a necessary part of these occupations in daily
practice, and arithmetic, taught with objects, is chiefly counting,
separating into fractional parts, and practical measurements. Books
are used rather as a convenient means of attracting and holding
attention while inducing habits of consecutive thinking than for a
knowledge of facts to be memorized. Those who can learn to read gain
naturally a means of self-entertainment, of self-instruction, hence a
certain amount of culture, so long as protected in an institution from
indiscriminate and pernicious literature.
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