Dedication
TO
THE SCHOOL TEACHERS
OF MY CHILDHOOD
IN TOKEN OF FORGIVENESS
Preface
This book is intended as an explanation of the new educational ideals and methods now being fostered and developed, under great difficulties, by courageous educators, in various schools for the most part outside the public school system. These schools are “experimental” in the sense that they are demonstrating upon a small scale the vast possibilities of a modern kind of education. The importance of these schools consists not so much in the advantages which they are now able to give to a few of our children, but rather in the prophetic vision they afford of all youth growing up with the same advantages.
Before that can happen, the public must discover what the new education signifies, and why the old educational system is unable to keep up with the demands of modern civilization.
This book attempts only a small part of such a tremendous task of enlightenment. But it does undertake a brief review of the educational situation in the light of our present scientific knowledge of human nature—and more especially, of the human nature of the child.
Education may be said to be, essentially, an adjustment between the child and the age in which he lives. That adjustment can be a painless and happy one; at present it is a sort of civil war. This book deals precisely with the special problems involved in the difficult process of reconciling the nature of the child with the nature of our twentieth-century machine-culture.
The method chosen in these pages for the exposition of this situation is one which many readers will consider unduly flippant, particularly in those passages which deal with the failure of the old educational system. But one might as well laugh at that failure as cry over it; for it is a ridiculous as well as a pathetic failure. The important thing is to recognize that it is a failure, and to lend a hand if we can in the creating of a better kind of education.
F. D.
Contents
| I | The Child 13 |
| II | The School Building 22 |
| III | The Teacher 27 |
| IV | The Book 36 |
| V | The Magic Theory of Education 47 |
| VI | The Caste System of Education 53 |
| VII | The Canonization of Book-Magic 58 |
| VIII | The Conquest of Culture in America 63 |
| IX | Smith, Jones and Robinson 69 |
| X | Employer vs. Trade Unionist 74 |
| XI | The Goose-Step 77 |
| XII | The Gary Plan 80 |
| XIII | Learning to Work 83 |
| XIV | Learning to Play 90 |
| XV | First and Last Things 96 |
| XVI | The Child as Artist 100 |
| XVII | The Artist as a Child 115 |
| XVIII | The Drama of Education 124 |
| XIX | The Drama of Life 132 |
| XX | Curiosity 137 |
| XXI | The Right to be Wrong 149 |
| XXII | Enterprise 157 |
| XXIII | Democracy 167 |
| XXIV | Responsibility 173 |
| XXV | Love 180 |
| XXVI | Education in 1947 A. D. 190 |