should remember that many of the suggestions made are merely Dewey's opinions, and while they carry great weight as the expressions of one of America's greatest thinkers, they may not be found true when tested by scientific evidence. The meaning of "scientific evidence" will become clearer in the next section of this chapter on methods of determining the relative values of topics. II. DETERMINING THE RELATIVE VALUES OF TOPICS Need to determine which valuable topics are most valuable. When a teacher begins to study the social values of subject matter, she may soon find that the social needs are so numerous, or the material so plentiful, or the time so limited, that she will have to select carefully from current valuable subject matter that which is most valuable for the children she is teaching. Spencer's classic discussion of relative values.-The question of relative values which thus arises is another of the issues which Spencer discussed most effectively. The title of his essay "What Knowledge is Most Worth" is a striking phrasing of the question. His vigorous presentation of the problem is contained in the following quotation : The question which we contend is of such transcendent moment is not whether such or such knowledge is of worth, but what is its relative worth? When they have named certain advantages which a given course of study has secured them, persons are apt to assume that they have justified themselves, quite forgetting that the adequateness of the advantage is the point to be judged. There is, perhaps, not a subject to which men devote attention that has not some value. A year diligently spent in getting up heraldry would very possibly give a little insight into ancient manners and morals and into the origin of names. Anyone who should learn the distances between all the towns in England might, in the course of his life, find one or two of the thousand facts he had acquired of some slight service when arranging a journey. Gathering together all the small gossip of a county, profitless occupation as it would be, might yet occasionally help to establish some useful fact—say, a good example of hereditary transmission. But in these cases everyone would admit that there was no proportion between the required labor and the probable benefit. No one would tolerate the proposal to devote some years of a boy's time to getting such information, at the cost of much more valuable information which he might else have got. And if here the test of relative value is appealed to and held conclusive, then should it be appealed to and held conclusive throughout. Had we time to master all subjects, we need not be particular. To quote the old song: Could a man be secure That his days would endure As of old, for a thousand long years, What deeds might he do! And all without hurry or care. But we that have but span-long lives must ever bear in mind our limited time for acquisition. And remembering how narrowly this time is limited, not only by the shortness of life but also still more by the business of life, we ought to be especially solicitous to employ what time we have to the greatest advantage. Relative values in arithmetic. Variations illustrated by denominate numbers. — Very simple and obvious examples of large differences in the social values of topics, all of which have some definite social value, are furnished by the tables of denominate numbers. For example, for city children the following facts certainly have very large social value : 12 things = I dozen 12 inches = I foot 3 feet = 1 yard Less valuable, however, is the following fact, which is used not in daily measures but frequently by literary writers as a rough statement of amount: 20 things = I Score Still less valuable for ordinary city children are the following measures, which have large social value, however, in certain social situations where they are actually used : Automatic skill with fundamental operations socially very useful. Similarly, in social life the ordinary operations in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers and decimals have very much larger value than many of the special measures that are used to furnish concrete problems in school. There are always educators, however, who tend to decry the acquisition of skill in abstract" number manipulation; skill in rapid, correct, automatic adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. A study of social life quickly reveals the error of this point of view, since such skill is a useful tool in many social operations, industrial, commercial, scientific, etc. As a result of the large and clearly recognized relative value of skill in such automatic operations, schools in recent years have given much attention to improved methods of drill in arithmetic. Increased time is usually not necessary, however, as improved methods of specific drill quickly achieve the automatic skill in the fundamental operations which is desirable. The most valuable topics determined by listing problems of ordinary citizens. — In an effort to determine precisely what phases of arithmetic have the largest value for ordinary citizens, Professor G. M. Wilson secured reports of the arithmetical problems which actually occurred in the lives of such citizens in Iowa, including architects, auctioneers, bankers, blacksmiths, bookkeepers, carpenters, contractors, farmers, housekeepers, laboring men, mechanics, merchants, printers, stock dealers, traveling men, etc. (7(b): 128–142.) After analyzing and classifying the 5036 problems which were reported, the following facts appeared: 3128 problems involved buying (in many cases by housekeepers) 464 problems involved selling by the person reporting the problem 251 problems involved keeping accounts 217 problems involved percentage 79 problems involved "practical measurement 56 problems involved cubic measure 41 problems involved discount 27 problems involved square measure Other social processes which ordinarily appear in arithmetic texts occur in smaller amount. It is obvious that buying and selling furnish most of the problems of these citizens and that keeping accounts and percentage furnish many more problems than do certain other activities. Most of the problems involved only one arithmetical process, and most of the numbers, figures, or quantities used contained less than four places. (7(b): 137) Spelling lists determined by scientific investigations of relative values. The above effort to determine the relative values of arithmetic problems by a precise, quantitative study of the number of times each type of problem occurs in the lives of ordinary citizens approximates a scientific method of determining relative values. Similar investigations which have been made concerning the relative needs of teaching different words in spelling have been carried so far that spelling books are now on the market which contain only the 4000 words which most children are likely to use in their writing in school or after graduation. They omit the 6000 or more words which have appeared in the ordinary spelling books for children, and which very seldom occur in the ordinary writing of children or adults. Such a practical application of the method of selecting subject matter on the basis of carefully determined relative values effects enormous social economy in schools by avoiding the teaching of facts which are socially of relatively little value. So important are such investigations that we shall describe two of them, one a study of the theme-writing vocabularies of children and the other a study of the letter-writing vocabularies of adults. ९९ Children's writing vocabularies; about 4500 different words. In 1914 Professor W. F. Jones published the results of a Concrete Investigation of the Material of English Spelling," based on the writing vocabularies of 1050 elementary school pupils in Illinois, Maryland, Iowa, and South Dakota. (10.) From 56 to 105 written themes were secured from each of these pupils on such topics as the following: in the second grade, "The Playhouse I should Like”; in the fifth grade, "What I did Last Saturday"; in the seventh and eighth grades, "The Study I Like Best" and "How I came to Tell a Lie." The writing of the themes extended over a long period, but in most cases by the time a child had handed in his fourteenth theme "the flow of new words had almost ceased." New words were then sought by varying the themes so as to reach into new and varied fields of experience, until each pupil's "word-well" had been pumped dry. In all the 75,000 themes, averaging 190 words per theme, only 4532 different words were used. Discovered the spelling demons of the English language.— When the misspelled words were counted, "one hundred spelling demons of the English language" were discovered. The four arch-demons are shown in the following table: "which," misspelled 321 times १९ "" } misspelled 612 times when counted together separate," misspelled 238 times From the complete list of spelling demons it appears that the words which gave the greatest difficulty in spelling throughout the grades are used by children in the second and third grades. |