If we open a treatise on pedagogy or examine a schedule of courses,
if we look through a programme or stop to consider our every-day
technical terminology, we cannot help noticing that education is
broken up by divisions and subdivisions _ad infinitum_, exactly as
though it were a material object, which because material possesses
infinite divisibility. Textbooks tell us that education is (1)
physical, (2) intellectual, (3) moral. Then narrowing the subject
down to one section, the intellectual, which for good reasons has
been treated more carefully and sympathetically by traditional
pedagogy, we find some such subdivisions: artistic, scientific,
literary, philosophical, religious, etc. Again, artistic education will
be split up into as many sections as there are arts, and scientific
instruction in the same way; for pedagogy assigns to each branch of
the classification its corresponding method of teaching. It goes without
saying that the sciences of any given branch are different among
themselves, and the study of botany, for example, is not the study
of zoology. And there are as many forms of culture to be promoted by
education as there are sciences; which is clearly shown by school
announcements assigning to certain years, and for definite days and
hours, the several courses of the curriculum, that is, the several
educations.
It is taken for granted that Education, properly so called, will
result from the ensemble of these particular educations--physical,
intellectual, moral, etc.,--each one of which contributes its share to
the final result, and is therefore a part of the entire education. And
each field produces certain peculiar results which it would be idle
to demand of another section, just as we never expect an olive grove
to yield a crop of peaches. Every part, self-contained and quite
distinct from the rest, absolutely excludes all other parts from
itself. Therefore the subjects taught in a school are numerous, and
there must accordingly be specialised teachers. And again each
instructor must be careful not to mix up the several parts which
compose his subject. The teacher of history, for example, when he takes
up the French Revolution, must forget the unification of Italy, and
treat each event in order and in turn; and the instructor of Italian
will take up the history of literature on a certain day of the week,
and devote some other hour to the study of the individual works
themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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