Essays on Educational ReformersQuick, Robert Hebert
History
Essays on Educational Reformers
Quick, Robert Hebert
Education -- History; Educators
2. The memory must be employed in strict subservience to the higher
faculties of the mind.
3. Whatever instruction is given, it must be adapted to the actual state
of the pupil, and not ruled by the wants of the future boy or man.
4. More time must be given to the study of nature and to modern language
and literature; less to the ancient languages.
5. The body must be educated as well as the mind.
6. Rich and poor alike must be taught to use their eyes and hands. 7.
The higher education of women must be cared for no less than that of men.
8. Teachers, no less than doctors, must go through a course of
professional training.
To these there must in time be added another:
9. All methods shall have a scientific foundation, _i.e._, they shall be
based on the laws of the mind, or shall have been tested by those laws.
§ 31. When this program is adopted, even as the object of our efforts,
we shall, indeed, have a New Education. At present the encouragement
of self-activity is thought of, if at all, only as a “counsel of
perfection.” Our school work is chiefly mechanical and will long
remain so. “From the primary school to the college productive creative
doing is almost wholly excluded. Knowledge in its barrenest form is
communicated, and tested in the barrenest, wordiest way possible. Never
is the learner taught or permitted to apply his knowledge to even
second-hand life-purpose.... So inveterate is the habit of the school
that the Kindergarten itself, although invented by the deep-feeling and
far-seeing Froebel for the very purpose of correcting this fault, has
in most cases fallen a victim to its influence.” So says W. H. Hailmann
(_Kindergarten_, May, 1888) and those who best know what usually goes on
in the school-room are the least likely to differ from him.
§ 32. During the last thirty years I have spent the greatest part of my
working hours in a variety of school-rooms; and if my school experience
has shown me that our advance is slow, my study of the Reformers
convinces me that it is sure.
“Ring out the old, ring in the new!”
It has been well said that to study science is to study the thoughts
of God; and thus it is that all true educational Reformers declare the
thoughts of God to us. “A divine message, of eternal regulation of the
Universe, there verily is in regard to every conceivable procedure and
affair of man;” and it behoves us to ascertain what that message is in
regard to the immensely important procedure and affair of bringing up
children. After innumerable mistakes we seem by degrees to be getting
some notion of it; and such insight as we have we owe to those who have
contributed to the science of education. Among these there are probably
no greater names than the names of Pestalozzi and Froebel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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