If I had not taken so much time in my other illustrations, I should like
to show how, beginning with very simple material things, the children
are led on to larger fields of investigation and to the intellectual
discipline that is the accompaniment of such research. I will simply
mention the experiment in which the work began. It consisted in making
precipitated chalk, used for polishing metals. The children, with
simple apparatus—a tumbler, lime water, and a glass tube—precipitated
the calcium carbonate out of the water; and from this beginning went on
to a study of the processes by which rocks of various sorts, igneous,
sedimentary, etc., had been formed on the surface of the earth and
the places they occupy; then to points in the geography of the United
States, Hawaii, and Porto Rico; to the effects of these various bodies
of rock, in their various configurations, upon the human occupations;
so that this geological record finally rounded itself out into the life
of man at the present time. The children saw and felt the connection
between these geologic processes, taking place ages and ages ago, and the
physical conditions determining the industrial occupations of today.
Of all the possibilities involved in the subject, “The School and the
Life of the Child,” I have selected but one, because I have found that
that one gives people more difficulty, is more of a stumbling-block, than
any other. One may be ready to admit that it would be most desirable
for the school to be a place in which the child should really live,
and get a life-experience in which he should delight and find meaning
for its own sake. But then we hear this inquiry: How, upon this basis,
shall the child get the needed information; how shall he undergo the
required discipline? Yes, it has come to this, that with many, if not
most, people the normal processes of life appear to be incompatible with
getting information and discipline. So I have tried to indicate, in a
highly general and inadequate way (for only the school itself, in its
daily operation, could give a detailed and worthy representation), how
the problem works itself out—how it is possible to lay hold upon the
rudimentary instincts of human nature, and, by supplying a proper medium,
so to control their expression as not only to facilitate and enrich the
growth of the individual child, but also to supply the same results, and
far more, of technical information and discipline that have been the
ideals of education in the past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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