of Chicago, beginning in 1896. This small school was similar in its plan to the experimental schools of Basedow, Pestalozzi, Herbart, and Froebel. The Elementary School Record, a series of nine monographs published in 1900, contains the best account of the work done in the school. In one of these Dewey wrote: One of the traditions of the school is of a visitor who, in its early days, called to see the kindergarten. On being told that the school had not as yet established one, she asked if there were not singing, drawing, manual training, plays and dramatizations, and attention to the children's social relations. When her questions were answered in the affirmative she remarked both triumphantly and indignantly that that was what she understood by a kindergarten, and she did not know what was meant by saying that the school had no kindergarten. The remark was perhaps justified in spirit, if not in letter. At all events, it suggests that in a certain sense the school endeavors throughout its whole course now including children between four and thirteen to carry into effect certain principles which Froebel was perhaps the first consciously to set forth. Speaking still in general, these principles are: 1. That the primary business of the school is to train children in coöperative and mutually helpful living. . . . 2. That the primary root of all educative activity is in the instinctive, impulsive attitudes and activities of the child, and not in the presentation and application of external material. . . . 3. That these individual tendencies and activities are organized and directed through the uses made of them in keeping up the coöperative living already spoker of, taking advantage of them to reproduce on the child's plane the typical doings and occupations of the larger, maturer society into which he is finally to go forth; and that it is through production and creative use that valuable knowledge is secured and clinched. So far as these statements correctly represent Froebel's educational philosophy, the school should be regarded as its exponent. (17: 142.) Industrial activities fundamental for society and the school. These quotations express the general similarity between Dewey's and Froebel's theories of education. It will be worth our while, however, to notice especially the way in which Dewey provides for the elements of social participation and motor expression, by making the study of industries a most fundamental factor in the elementary curriculum. Coupled with Dewey's fundamental premise, that "the school cannot be a preparation for social life except as it reproduces the typical conditions of social life," is the fundamental idea in his social psychology that industrial activities are the most influential factors in determining the thought, the ideals, and EXAMPLE OF HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTIVE 1900 Reproduced by permission of the publishers from the Elementary School Record. (University of Chicago Press) the social organization of any people. If this is true, then, according to his first premise, industrial activities ought to have a large place in the work of the school, not for technical but for liberalizing purposes. A discussion of Dewey's socialpsychological principle is contained in his article entitled "Interpretation of Savage Mind" (Psy chological Review, 1902, Vol. IX, pp. 217-230). The practical consequences for the curriculum are described in many of Dewey's writings. Industrial history a liberalizing study. In the Elementary School Record the emphasis on the study of the history of industries, which Dewey would make an important element in the curriculum, is stated as follows: When history is conceived as dynamic, as moving, its economic and industrial aspects are emphasized. These are but technical terms which express the problem with which humanity is unceasingly engaged; how to live, how to master and use nature so as to make it tributary to the enrichment of human life. The great advances in civilization have come through those manifestations of intelligence which have lifted man from his precarious subjection to nature, and revealed to him how he can make its forces coöperate with his own purposes. . . . The industrial history of man is not a materialistic or merely utilitarian affair. It is a matter of intelligence. Its record is the record of how man learned to think, to think to some effect, to transform the conditions of life so that life itself became a different thing. It is an ethical record as well; the account of the conditions which men have patiently wrought out to serve their ends. (17: 199.) Dewey's "occupations" psychologically different from manual training.-On the psychological side, that is, on the side of method according to Dewey, the industrial-historical material is not to be treated as so many facts or principles to be learned, but the child is to carry on in miniature the industrial processes which he is studying. These activities which Dewey calls "occupations" are quite different in their "reality" from the kindergarten occupations. They are also different from the ordinary manual training with which Dewey contrasted them as follows: The fundamental point in the psychology of an occupation is that it maintains a balance between the intellectual and practical phases of experience. . . . It involves . . . continual planning and reflection, in order that the practical or executive side may be carried out. . . . It is possible to carry on this type of work . . . so that the entire emphasis falls upon the manual or physical side. In such cases the work is reduced to a mere routine or custom and its educational value is lost. This is the inevitable tendency wherever, in manual training, for instance, the mastery of certain tools or the production of certain objects is made the primary end, and the child is not given, wherever possible, intellectual responsibility for selecting the materials and instruments that are most fit, and given an opportunity to think out his own model and plan of work, led to perceive his own errors, and find how to correct them that is, of course, within the range of his capacities. (17: 82.) It is interesting to note that Dewey's theory of training through occupations, involving motor activity and reasoning, is a reiteration of the theory formulated over a century before by Rousseau. The same is true concerning.his theory of making industrial activities the basis of a study of social relations. Training in verbal expression based on real social communication. Both Parker and Dewey maintain that superior training in expression, even in verbal expression, results from making the school a coöperative social situation. This follows, they claim, not only because of the connection between thought and expression, but because it takes advantage of the child's TRAINING IN EXPRESSION IN DEWEY'S ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, 1900 Animals modeled in clay by children six years old. Reproduced by permission of the publishers from the Elementary School Record. (University of Chicago Press) instinct of communication by providing a real audience-situation. Dewey says, "Language is primarily a social thing, a means by which we give our experiences to others and get theirs again in return." Hence the proper basis for a language training is (1) the child with some experience he desires to express, and (2) an audience that he feels is interested in learning of his experience. This basis, especially for oral composition, has been adopted in many places where other phases of Deweyism have no place. Artistic training to begin with crude original representation. The pictures on pages 476 and 478 show how different Dewey's conception of training in motor expression as applied in the arts is from Froebel's. Pestalozzi and Froebel placed the emphasis on "forms of beauty" constructed in more or less mechanical ways. Parker and Dewey place the emphasis on the expression of ordinary experiences and the courage to be crude." Modern biological psychology emphasizes motor expression: William James.-A prominent factor in securing recognition of the principle of "education through doing" has been the "new psychology," of which the works of William James (1842-1910) are the best representatives in this country. His "Principles of Psychology" published in 1890, the "Briefer Course" which has been widely used as a textbook, and his "Talks to Teachers on Psychology" (1899) have influenced all ranks, from the most advanced scholar to the most immature normal-school student. In Chapter III of his Talks," entitled The Child as a Behaving Organism, he says he will take the "biological point of view" that man is primarily a behaving organism. Further he says: It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of our own day the emphasis is transferred from the mind's purely rational function [that is, theoretical, abstract thinking] where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call the whole classic tradition in philosophy has placed it, to the so long neglected practical side. The theory of evolution is mainly responsible for this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose mind, so far as it can have any function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their movements to the impressions received from the environment, so as to escape the better from destruction. Consciousness would thus seem in the first instance to be nothing but a sort of super-added biological perfection useless unless it prompted to conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration. (19: 23.) In terms of this biological conception, education, according to James, becomes "the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior." Laboratory experiments show "no impression without expression." This emphasis on behavior as the fundamental element in education receives further support from the psychological fact that there can be "no impression without correlative expression." This fact is determined not only by the biological theory stated above, but by actual laboratory |