I wish to say one word more about the relationship of our particular
school to the University. The problem is to unify, to organize,
education, to bring all its various factors together, through putting it
as a whole into organic union with everyday life. That which lies back
of the pedagogical school of the University is the necessity of working
out something to serve as a model for such unification, extending from
work beginning with the four-year-old child up through the graduate
work of the University. Already we have much help from the University
in scientific work planned, sometimes even in detail, by heads of the
departments. The graduate student comes to us with his researches and
methods, suggesting ideas and problems. The library and museum are at
hand. We want to bring all things educational together; to break down
the barriers that divide the education of the little child from the
instruction of the maturing youth; to identify the lower and the higher
education, so that it shall be demonstrated to the eye that there is no
lower and higher, but simply education.
Speaking more especially with reference to the pedagogical side of the
work: I suppose the oldest university chair of pedagogy in our country
is about twenty years old—that of the University of Michigan, founded
in the latter seventies. But there are only one or two that have tried
to make a connection between theory and practice. They teach for the
most part by theory, by lectures, by reference to books, rather than
through the actual work of teaching itself. At Columbia, through the
Teachers College, there is an extensive and close connection between the
University and the training of teachers. Something has been done in one
or two other places along the same line. We want an even more intimate
union here, so that the University shall put all its resources at the
disposition of the elementary school, contributing to the evolution of
valuable subject-matter and right method, while the school in turn will
be a laboratory in which the student of education sees theories and ideas
demonstrated, tested, criticized, enforced, and the evolution of new
truths. We want the school in its relation to the University to be a
working model of a unified education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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