Our Schools in War Time—and AfterDean, Arthur D. (Arthur Davis)
History
Our Schools in War Time—and After
Dean, Arthur D. (Arthur Davis)
Education -- United States; World War, 1914-1918 -- War work -- Schools
In dealing with the institution of higher grade we find as many
distinctions in service. In the college of the cultural type--the
college of individualism--it is the individual who serves the State,
how nobly may be seen in the English universities of Oxford and
Cambridge. In the public schools and socialized institutions with
vocational work, however, it is the institution which serves. This
service of the institution may be classified under two heads. In the
case of the elementary schools to some extent, and of the high schools
to a greater extent, our war work should be brought into them. In
the technical, vocational, and trade schools the institution should
reach out towards the war. In the first instance the function of the
elementary and secondary school should be to adhere to the purposes
for which they were created. The function of the higher technical,
vocational, and trade schools should be to prepare the skilled students
to take the places of those who are called to military service; to give
scientific training, indispensable in war; to assist, through courses
for the blind and crippled, in the reëducation of those disabled in
war service,--that is, our technical schools may be schools of special
preparation and industrial readjustment.
We shall observe, in working out the problem, that we have offered to
us by the war an opportunity to make our schools better by bringing
education closer to life, not only materially but spiritually. If we
have failed to train our youth in coöperation and service to the State
in the past, the war gives us a new motive. For to impart skill in use
of hand or brain without teaching collective responsibility is to fail
in our national duty. To our schools we must look as the agencies which
are to carry on the great work of education in service, a noble and
purposeful objective for which to work, directing the growth of our
children into an efficient and devoted citizenship.
Someone will urge: "The war will soon be over and we shall hardly get
started in war service before there will be no need for such service."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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