Just as the parts are separated, so do the ideals differ—moral
development, practical utility, general culture, discipline, and
professional training. These aims are each especially represented in
some distinct part of the system of education; and, with the growing
interaction of the parts, each is supposed to afford a certain amount
of culture, discipline, and utility. But the lack of fundamental unity
is witnessed in the fact that one study is still considered good for
discipline, and another for culture; some parts of arithmetic, for
example, for discipline and others for use; literature for culture;
grammar for discipline; geography partly for utility, partly for culture;
and so on. The unity of education is dissipated, and the studies become
centrifugal; so much of this study to secure this end, so much of that to
secure another, until the whole becomes a sheer compromise and patchwork
between contending aims and disparate studies. The great problem in
education on the administrative side is to secure the unity of the whole,
in the place of a sequence of more or less unrelated and overlapping
parts, and thus to reduce the waste arising from friction, reduplication,
and transitions that are not properly bridged.
[Illustration: Chart II.]
In this second symbolic diagram (II) I wish to suggest that really the
only way to unite the parts of the system is to unite each to life. We
can get only an artificial unity so long as we confine our gaze to the
school system itself. We must look at it as part of the larger whole of
social life. This block (A) in the center represents the school system as
a whole. (1) At one side we have the home, and the two arrows represent
the free interplay of influences, materials, and ideas between the home
life and that of the school. (2) Below we have the relation to the
natural environment, the great field of geography in the widest sense.
The school building has about it a natural environment. It ought to be in
a garden, and the children from the garden would be led on to surrounding
fields, and then into the wider country, with all its facts and forces.
(3) Above is represented business life, and the necessity for free play
between the school and the needs and forces of industry. (4) On the other
side is the university proper, with its various phases, its laboratories,
its resources in the way of libraries, museums, and professional schools.
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