What is possible can be only a compromise. Physical education will go on
in the home principally, and intellectual education in the school.
Something might be done to organize the teaching of parents; lectures
and demonstrations at the public schools might be given weekly, in the
evenings, for parents, by competent nurses or hygienists. But they would
remain largely ineffective. Until the whole atrocious system of herding
working people in close-built cities, by way of making them serviceable
cogwheels in the capitalistic machine for grinding out rent and profit,
comes to an end, the physical education of children will remain at best
a pathetic compromise.
We have left to consider what may be done in the way of improving
intellectual education. What is really necessary for a child to know
which he is not taught now? and what is taught that is unnecessary?
As to reading and writing there is no dispute, though there is much
dispute about the way of doing it. But beyond that children should
know--_things_; from their earlier school days they should know the
geography of their own locality, not rehearsing it from a book, but by
going over the ground, having the relations of places explained to them,
and by being shown how to model relief maps themselves. They should know
the indications of the weather, being taught the use of instruments for
measuring air-pressures, temperatures, amount of sunshine, etc.; they
should know the special geology of their own locality, the nature of the
soil and its products, through practical exhibition; they should be
allowed to construct, from clay, stone, or brick, such little buildings
as they usually like to make, and from them the simple principles of
geometry taught. You see, every school needs a big yard, and play-rooms
with tools in them,--the use of which tools they should be taught.
Arithmetic, to be sure, they need to know--but arithmetic connected with
things. Let them learn fractions by cutting up things and putting them
together, and not be bothered by abstractions running into the hundreds
of thousands, the millions, which never in time will they use. And drop
all that tiresome years' work in interest and per cent; if decimals are
understood, every one who has need will be amply able to work out
systems of interest when necessary.
Children should know the industrial life through which they live, into
which they are probably going. They should see how cloth is woven,
thread is spun, shoes are made, iron forged and wrought; again not alone
by written description, but by eye-witness. They should, as they grow
older, learn the history of the arts of peace.
What they do not need to know, is so much of the details of the history
of destruction; the general facts and results of wars are sufficient.
They do not need to be impressed with the details of killings, which
they sensibly forget, and inevitably also.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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