But all this means a necessary change in the attitude of the school, one
of which we are as yet far from realizing the full force. Our school
methods, and to a very considerable extent our curriculum, are inherited
from the period when learning and command of certain symbols, affording
as they did the only access to learning, were all-important. The ideals
of this period are still largely in control, even where the outward
methods and studies have been changed. We sometimes hear the introduction
of manual training, art, and science into the elementary, and even the
secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they tend toward the
production of specialists—that they detract from our present scheme of
generous, liberal culture. The point of this objection would be ludicrous
if it were not often so effective as to make it tragic. It is our present
education which is highly specialized, one-sided, and narrow. It is
an education dominated almost entirely by the mediaeval conception of
learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the
intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate
information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our
impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether
in the form of utility or of art. The very fact that manual training,
art, and science are objected to as technical, as tending toward mere
specialism, is of itself as good testimony as could be offered to the
specialized aim which controls current education. Unless education had
been virtually identified with the exclusively intellectual pursuits,
with learning as such, all these materials and methods would be welcome,
would be greeted with the utmost hospitality.
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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