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CHAPTER I.

THE AIM OR PURPOSE OF EDUCATION.

SUGGESTED READINGS.

NOTE: See Bibliography in the Appendix for authors, publishers, and prices of all Reference Books.

UP THROUGH CHILDHOOD. Hubbell. pp. 3-74.

EDUCATION IN RELIGION AND MORALS. Coe. pp. 119-
THE MEANING OF EDUCATION. Butler. pp. 3-34.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION. Seeley. pp. 172-182.
PSYCHOLOGIC FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION. Harris.

THE TEACHING OF BIBLE CLASSES. See. pp. 1-5.
ENTERING ON LIFE. Geikie. pp. 1-26.

HOW TO PLAN THE LESSON. Brown. Chap. 1.

EDUCATIONAL AIMS AND VALUES. Hannus. pp. 5-20.
TALKS TO TEACHERS. James. pp. 29-32.

EDUCATION AND LIFE. Baker. pp. 2-18.
EDUCATION. Spencer. pp. 1-37, 119-120.

FOUNDATION PRINCIPLES. Moore. pp. 9-18.
DESTINY OF MAN. Fiske. pp. 35-76.

MY PEDAGOGIC CREED. Dewey. pp. 3-4.

Man's Five-Fold Educational Inheritance.

pp. 264-270.

President Butler has divided Man's Educational Needs into (1) His Scientific Inheritance, by which he means the widest erudition in the knowledge of Nature and of Scientific Development; to which dry Mathematics is but the lower rung of the ladder. (2) His Historical Inheritance of Literature and Biography, the broad, wide vision that looks down through the Vista of the Past: to which the study of Language is but the key of interpretation. (3) His Political Inheritance, those institutional factors which have influenced his place in the great family of nations: the vast element of civilization and of society under which we act. (4) His Aesthetic or Artistic Inheritance: that feeling for the sublime, the picturesque, the beautiful, which is so akin to the deepest religious life. (5) His Religious Inheritance: that seeks a response to those high spiritual ideals,

which the teacher is to satisfy by lofty example and noble precept.

The Factors or Means.

The factors or means by which a child is educated according to its fivefold needs, are: (1) The Family, which by example and precept is extremely potent, and where the intimacy of contact is powerful in determining imitation. (2) The School, which is chiefly of intellectual value. (3) Business life, leading to habits of system and method. (4) Society, where manners and etiquette, touching social relationship and intercourse are bred as second nature. (5) The Church and Religious Education, dealing more especially with moral knowledge.

The Object or Aim of the Church School.

The Purpose, or Aim, or Object of the school lies at the bottom of all right Education. It is because the Aim of the Sunday School has not been clear heretofore that, in so many cases, the Sunday School has been a failure. The great discovery of the past century has been the Discovery of the Child. Before that there were but two factors in Education: The Teacher and the Material. Since the days of the Educational Reformers there have been three factors: The Teacher, the Material, and the Child. With the discovery of the Child came a new realization of Education. The standpoint changed. There are still many one-sided or partial aims held by some persons which, when followed, give a very imperfect and unsatisfactory Education.

Some have considered that Education was for "information only," and have over-emphasized, therefore, the goal in their selection of material. If the aim of education be more knowledge, then the success of a school will be measured by the rapidity with which the pupils increase their stock of learning. Attention will be paid to the mere details and facts of knowledge. The children will become encyclopaedias of general information. Like the products of many of our young ladies' "finishing schools," they will have a smattering of a great many things, thorough knowledge of none, and no vital principles. When knowledge comes first, true righteousness and the whole range of virtues are minimized or set aside.

Others would claim that the chief essential in Education is "Power." If power be sought, then the doing side must be emphasized and a general enlargement of the narrow range of information be adopted. As Coe has put it: "Instead of the clear, cold logic-engine, which mere intellectualism regards as the proper product of education, the drift of popular thought is now toward another kind of mental engine, the kind that keeps the practical machinery of life in motion." Average Sunday School Teachers are very apt to select some one aim in religious education and over-emphasize it. One school will lay over-stress upon the Catechism and subordinate the other elements of a wellrounded education to the study of this Formula of the Faith. Another school will pay little regard to the Catechism and hold the essential of the school to be a knowledge of the Bible, and will test the results of the Teachers' work by the examinations held. Still another school will gauge the efficiency of the Sunday School by the number brought to Christ in Confirmation, and will expect a direct ratio between the Sunday School and the Confirmation class.

All these aims are partial and imperfect. Education is a broader and wider thing than any one or two of these elements would indicate. We are concerned with the whole child, the whole man, in his attitude toward life, not merely with his attitude toward the Confirmation class or toward Religion, or the Church.

Definitions of Education.

There are other definitions of Education which indicate a broader process. Here is one from Webster's Dictionary: "Education implies not so much the communication of knowledge, as the discipline of the intellect, the establishment of the principles, and the regulation of the heart." Here we have a practical division under the old trinity, Intellect, Feelings, and Will, the three angles of a complete triangle. Dr. Wickersham gives another: "Education is the process of developing or drawing out the faculties of the individual man, and training him for the various functions of life." Tomkins puts it this way: "Teaching is the process by which one man from set purposes produces the life-unfolding process in another." The late Bishop Hunt

ington states it tersely: "Education is not the training of the mind, but the training of the man." Joseph Cook once said: "Educate a man's body alone and you have a brute; educate his mind alone and you have a skeptic; educate his spirit alone and you have a bigot; educate his body, and his mind, and his spirit, and you have the noblest work of God—a man." Professor William James states it thus: "Education cannot be better described than by calling it the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies of behavior." President Nicholas Murray Butler calls it a gradual adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the race. J. P. Munroe says, the question to be asked at the end of an educational step is not, What has the child learned? but, What has the child become? All of these definitions and many similar ones from the great educators indicate the same grasp of the true meaning of Education. That is the result to-day of the experience of educational reformers of the past century.

Professor Dewey's Broad Statement.

"All education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it; or differentiate it in some particular direction.

"The only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. For

instance, through the response which is made to the child's instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language, and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language."

This educational process has two sides-one psychological and one sociological; and neither one can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results, but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature.

Knowledge of social conditions, of the present state of civilization, is necessary in order properly to interpret the child's powers. The child has his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalents. We must be able to carry them back to a social past and see them as the inheritance of previous race activities. We must also be able to project them into the future to see what their outcome and end will be. In the illustration just used, it is the ability to see in the child's babblings the promise and potency of a future social intercourse and conversation which enables one to deal in the proper way with that instinct.

The psychological and social sides are organically related, and education cannot be regarded as compromises between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. We are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal-that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us any idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the

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