EXERCISES AND PROBLEMS 1. Compare a textbook of seventy-five to a hundred years ago with a present-day textbook in reading, geography, history, language, or arithmetic, and describe the differences. 2. Look up and report on The Springfield Tests, as given by Caldwell and Courtis. 3. Draw up a ruled rating sheet, with each of the expression studies listed in a column down the left-hand side, and the following qualities in training in order across the top:-school spirit, organization, selfcontrol, understanding of industrial processes, managerial training, citizenship training, practical utility, problem-solving, judgment. Then rate, on a scale of 5 [very good (4), good (3), fair (2), poor (1)], each expression study. 4. A good high-school staff of a quarter-century ago, in a city of fifteen to twenty thousand people, consisted of a principal, a janitor, and ten to fifteen teachers; offered from three to five courses of study, differing only in part; and had a student body of from three to four hundred. Compare this, in staff and offerings and student body with a high school in a city of similar size to-day. 5. Read up and describe the Gary School plan, or the Platoon plan. 6. Read up and describe the work of a good Junior College. *Bonser, F. G. Bourne, R. S. Briggs, T. H. *Bunker, F. F. 8, 1916, U. S. Caldwell, O. W. *Caldwell, O. W., pp.) COLLATERAL READING The Elementary School Curriculum, chaps. 1–v. The Junior High School, chaps. I, II. The Reorganization of the Public School System, Bulletin Dewey, J. and E. Science Remaking the World, chap. I. and Courtis, S. A. Then and Now in Education. (400 Schools of To-morrow, chaps. VII and x. (Gary.) *Flexner, A. A Modern School. (23 pp.) *Hardy, E. L. "The Reorganization of our Educational System"; in School and Society, vol. v, pp. 728-32. Horn, J. L. The American Elementary School, chaps. II, XIII. Lewis, W. D. Democracy's High School. (125 pp.) *Pechstein, L. A., and McGregor, A. L. Psychology of the Junior High School Pupil, part 1. Robbins, C. L. The School as a Social Institution, chaps. XII, XIII. *Russell, W. Economy in Secondary Education. (74 pp.) Van Denburg, J. K. The Junior High School Idea, chap. 1. CHAPTER XVI NEW SOCIAL RELATIONS OF THE SCHOOLS New functions and services. Along with the marked expansion of the school curriculum and its change in character, and the reorganization of the school the better to adapt its work to the growth needs of the pupils and the new social and civic demands of our national life, as described in the preceding chapter, has come another important development of the school in what it now does, along new lines, for both the children and the adults of the community which it serves. Once a somewhat isolated and a purely academic institution, dealing only with children, the school of to-day has taken on many new functions and services that cause it to influence the lives of children and to reach into the homes of the community in many new and important ways. These new services and functions of the school have been added one by one, and their addition has come about as a part of a great social movement among our people. In part this has been as a result of the work of the school itself, and in part the result of outside forces. Whatever the origin and cause, though, an entirely new attitude toward problems of child welfare and social welfare has come to characterize the thinking of our people, within the past quarter-century, and many new laws of a humanitarian and child-welfare type have found place on the statute books of our States. The school has shared in this movement, and in some of it the school has been the leader. As a result, progressive school systems to-day are carrying on activities and rendering a social service that a few years ago was not only almost unknown, but would not then have been considered a func tion of the school at all. What the more important of these new functions and services are we shall consider in this chapter. Compulsory-attendance legislation. The enforcement of the compulsory attendance of children at school was probably the first of the movements which have served to change the character of the relations of the school and the home. Massachusetts enacted the first modern part-time compulsory-attendance law in 1852, and Connecticut, in 1890, the first law requiring attendance at school the entire time the schools were in session. Since 1900 there has been a general revision of earlier laws to make them more binding, and the majority of our States now require the attendance at school of all children, with certain exempted classes, for the full time the schools are in session. The tendency, too, has been to increase the compulsory-age limit from twelve or thirteen to fifteen or sixteen years of age. Coupled with the new compulsory-attendance legislation has come much new child-welfare and anti-child-labor legislation. As a result the labor of children has been greatly restricted, the demand for school facilities greatly increased, and special officers have been found necessary for the enforcement of the new compulsory-attendance and child-labor laws. One of the outcomes of this legislation has been to throw an entirely new burden on the schools. Whereas formerly the pupils in school were those for whom the school was well adapted and who wanted to attend, to-day the demand is that the school shall educate "all the children of all the people." The truant and the incorrigible, who once left early or were expelled, must now be cared for, and the school now finds it a much more difficult matter to teach all the children than it used to be to teach only those who came to learn. The enforcement of the compulsory-education and the child-labor laws, too, has brought into the school the foreign-born who prefer to work; those who have no aptitude for book learning; many children of inferior mental ability, who do not profit by ordinary classroom procedures; and, in addition, the crippled, the tubercular, the deaf, the epileptics, the blind, the sick, the diseased, the needy, and the physically unfit. Not infrequently boys have been taken from work, and newly married girls brought back to school. The result has been to throw upon the school a new burden in the form of a public expectancy for accomplishment, whereas a compulsory-education law cannot create capacity to profit from education. Attempts to solve the new problems. At first the schools were literally swamped by the magnitude of the new undertaking. Under earlier conditions the school, not geared to educate such children, let them drop from the rolls or expelled them, and no longer concerned itself about them. FIG. 29. HOME, STREET, SCHOOL, AND OTHER INFLUENCES (After Perry.) With the enforcement of the new laws the school was compelled to face a new instructional problem. The task became that of trying to salvage as many of these misfits as possible, training them for whatever form of social and personal usefulness their talents would allow, and then turning them back into society with some equipment serviceable to themselves and others. This called for a very material expansion of the scope and work of the public school, the employment of new means of classification and instruction, and the creation of new types of classes and schools. We soon found that many school systems, because of their small size, could not meet the problem alone, and that some county or State schools of special type-parental schools, industrial schools, reform schools - were needed to supplement what the puplic schools could do. We also soon learned that it would cost more to care for and educate such children properly than to teach normal children, but that it would be cheaper for society in the long run that the schools should do the work. The problem, too, soon became evident as a double one first, that of providing for the needs of the classes forced into or forced to remain in school; and second, that of preventing the development of delinquency among the other children of the school. Unless both these needs could be met, compulsory-education laws would only force into the schools types of children who would get but little value from the instruction, and who would prove troublesome, with a resulting increase of over-age and retarded children, disciplinary cases, corporal punishments, the contamination of other groups, and at the same time defeat the social and citizenship aims of the school. Solutions arrived at. After much experimenting, the needs of the classes forced in or to remain have been met largely by the organization of the differentiated courses of study we have previously described (see Figure 27, page 278); the establishment of elementary industrial-school work for those who cannot profit by the regular school instruction; the formation of non-English-speaking and over-age classes; the liberal use of play and training in organized government and control; emphasis on the newer expression studies which involve the elements underlying the trades of |