There would be,
also, samples of the more perfect forms of textile work, as Italian,
French, Japanese, and Oriental. There would be objects illustrating
motives of design and decoration which have entered into production.
Literature would contribute its part in its idealized representation
of the world-industries, as the Penelope in the _Odyssey_—a classic in
literature because the character is an adequate embodiment of a certain
industrial phase of social life. So, from Homer down to the present
time, there is a continuous procession of related facts which have been
translated into terms of art. Music lends its share, from the Scotch song
at the wheel to the spinning song of Marguerite, or of Wagner’s Senta.
The shop becomes a pictured museum, appealing to the eye. It would have
not only materials—beautiful woods and designs—but would give a synopsis
of the historical evolution of architecture in its drawings and pictures.
Thus I have attempted to indicate how the school may be connected
with life so that the experience gained by the child in a familiar,
commonplace way is carried over and made use of there, and what the
child learns in the school is carried back and applied in everyday life,
making the school an organic whole, instead of a composite of isolated
parts. The isolation of studies as well as of parts of the school system
disappears. Experience has its geographical aspect, its artistic and its
literary, its scientific and its historical sides. All studies arise from
aspects of the one earth and the one life lived upon it. We do not have
a series of stratified earths, one of which is mathematical, another
physical, another historical, and so on. We should not be able to live
very long in any one taken by itself. We live in a world where all sides
are bound together. All studies grow out of relations in the one great
common world. When the child lives in varied but concrete and active
relationship to this common world, his studies are naturally unified. It
will no longer be a problem to correlate studies. The teacher will not
have to resort to all sorts of devices to weave a little arithmetic into
the history lesson, and the like. Relate the school to life, and all
studies are of necessity correlated.
Moreover, if the school is related as a whole to life as a whole, its
various aims and ideals—culture, discipline, information, utility—cease
to be variants, for one of which we must select one study and for another
another. The growth of the child in the direction of social capacity and
service, his larger and more vital union with life, becomes the unifying
aim; and discipline, culture, and information fall into place as phases
of this growth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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