last week i tried to put before you the relationship between the school and the larger life of the community, and the necessity for certain changes in the methods and materials of school work, that it might be better adapted to present social needs.

today i wish to look at the matter from the other side, and consider the relationship of the school to the life and development of the children in the school. as it is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as little children, i have taken the liberty of introducing a good deal of illustrative matter from the work of the university elementary school, that in some measure you may appreciate the way in which the ideas presented work themselves out in actual practice.

some few years ago i was looking about the school supply stores in the city, trying to find desks and chairs which seemed thoroughly suitable from all points of view—artistic, hygienic, and educational—to the needs of the children. we had a good deal of difficulty in finding what 48we needed, and finally one dealer, more intelligent than the rest, made this remark: “i am afraid we have not what you want. you want something at which the children may work; these are all for listening.” that tells the story of the traditional education. just as the biologist can take a bone or two and reconstruct the whole animal, so, if we put before the mind’s eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly desks placed in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as little moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just space enough to hold books, pencils and paper, and add a table, some chairs, the bare walls, and possibly a few pictures, we can reconstruct the only educational activity that can possibly go on in such a place. it is all made “for listening”—for simply studying lessons out of a book is only another kind of listening; it marks the dependency of one mind upon another. the attitude of listening means, comparatively speaking, passivity, absorption; that there are certain ready-made materials which are there, which have been prepared by the school superintendent, the board, the teacher, and of which the child is to take in as much as possible in the least possible time.

there is very little place in the traditional schoolroom for the child to work. the workshop, the laboratory, the materials, the tools with which 49the child may construct, create, and actively inquire, and even the requisite space, have been for the most part lacking. the things that have to do with these processes have not even a definitely recognized place in education. they are what the educational authorities who write editorials in the daily papers generally term “fads” and “frills.” a lady told me yesterday that she had been visiting different schools trying to find one where activity on the part of the children preceded the giving of information on the part of the teacher, or where the children had some motive for demanding the information. she visited, she said, twenty-four different schools before she found her first instance. i may add that that was not in this city.

another thing that is suggested by these schoolrooms, with their set desks, is that everything is arranged for handling as large numbers of children as possible; for dealing with children en masse, as an aggregate of units; involving, again, that they be treated passively. the moment children act they individualize themselves; they cease to be a mass, and become the intensely distinctive beings that we are acquainted with out of school, in the home, the family, on the playground, and in the neighborhood.

on the same basis is explicable the uniformity of method and curriculum. if everything is on 50a “listening” basis, you can have uniformity of material and method. the ear, and the book which reflects the ear, constitute the medium which is alike for all. there is next to no opportunity for adjustment to varying capacities and demands. there is a certain amount—a fixed quantity—of ready-made results and accomplishments to be acquired by all children alike in a given time. it is in response to this demand that the curriculum has been developed from the elementary school up through the college. there is just so much desirable knowledge, and there are just so many needed technical accomplishments in the world. then comes the mathematical problem of dividing this by the six, twelve, or sixteen years of school life. now give the children every year just the proportionate fraction of the total, and by the time they have finished they will have mastered the whole. by covering so much ground during this hour or day or week or year, everything comes out with perfect evenness at the end—provided the children have not forgotten what they have previously learned. the outcome of all this is matthew arnold’s report of the statement, proudly made to him by an educational authority in france, that so many thousands of children were studying at a given hour, say eleven o’clock, just such a lesson in geography; and in one of our own western 51cities this proud boast used to be repeated to successive visitors by its superintendent.

i may have exaggerated somewhat in order to make plain the typical points of the old education: its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method. it may be summed up by stating that the center of gravity is outside the child. it is in the teacher, the text-book, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself. on that basis there is not much to be said about the life of the child. a good deal might be said about the studying of the child, but the school is not the place where the child lives. now the change which is coming into our education is the shifting of the center of gravity. it is a change, a revolution, not unlike that introduced by copernicus when the astronomical center shifted from the earth to the sun. in this case the child becomes the sun about which the appliances of education revolve; he is the center about which they are organized.

if we take an example from an ideal home, where the parent is intelligent enough to recognize what is best for the child, and is able to supply what is needed, we find the child learning through the social converse and constitution of the family. there are certain points of interest and value to him in the conversation carried on: 52statements are made, inquiries arise, topics are discussed, and the child continually learns. he states his experiences, his misconceptions are corrected. again the child participates in the household occupations, and thereby gets habits of industry, order, and regard for the rights and ideas of others, and the fundamental habit of subordinating his activities to the general interest of the household. participation in these household tasks becomes an opportunity for gaining knowledge. the ideal home would naturally have a workshop where the child could work out his constructive instincts. it would have a miniature laboratory in which his inquiries could be directed. the life of the child would extend out of doors to the garden, surrounding fields, and forests. he would have his excursions, his walks and talks, in which the larger world out of doors would open to him.

now, if we organize and generalize all of this, we have the ideal school. there is no mystery about it, no wonderful discovery of pedagogy or educational theory. it is simply a question of doing systematically and in a large, intelligent, and competent way what for various reasons can be done in most households only in a comparatively meager and haphazard manner. in the first place, the ideal home has to be enlarged. the child must be brought into contact with more grown 53people and with more children in order that there may be the freest and richest social life. moreover, the occupations and relationships of the home environment are not specially selected for the growth of the child; the main object is something else, and what the child can get out of them is incidental. hence the need of a school. in this school the life of the child becomes the all-controlling aim. all the media necessary to further the growth of the child center there. learning?—certainly, but living primarily, and learning through and in relation to this living. when we take the life of the child centered and organized in this way, we do not find that he is first of all a listening being; quite the contrary.

the statement so frequently made that education means “drawing out” is excellent, if we mean simply to contrast it with the process of pouring in. but, after all, it is difficult to connect the idea of drawing out with the ordinary doings of the child of three, four, seven, or eight years of age. he is already running over, spilling over, with activities of all kinds. he is not a purely latent being whom the adult has to approach with great caution and skill in order gradually to draw out some hidden germ of activity. the child is already intensely active, and the question of education is the question of taking hold of his activities, of giving them direction. through direction, through 54organized use, they tend toward valuable results, instead of scattering or being left to merely impulsive expression.

if we keep this before us, the difficulty i find uppermost in the minds of many people regarding what is termed the new education is not so much solved as dissolved; it disappears. a question often asked is: if you begin with the child’s ideas, impulses and interests, all so crude, so random and scattering, so little refined or spiritualized, how is he going to get the necessary discipline, culture and information? if there were no way open to us except to excite and indulge these impulses of the child, the question might well be asked. we should either have to ignore and repress the activities, or else to humor them. but if we have organization of equipment and of materials, there is another path open to us. we can direct the child’s activities, giving them exercise along certain lines, and can thus lead up to the goal which logically stands at the end of the paths followed.

“if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” since they are not, since really to satisfy an impulse or interest means to work it out, and working it out involves running up against obstacles, becoming acquainted with materials, exercising ingenuity, patience, persistence, alertness, it of necessity involves discipline—ordering of power—and 55supplies knowledge. take the example of the little child who wants to make a box. if he stops short with the imagination or wish, he certainly will not get discipline. but when he attempts to realize his impulse, it is a question of making his idea definite, making it into a plan, of taking the right kind of wood, measuring the parts needed, giving them the necessary proportions, etc. there is involved the preparation of materials, the sawing, planing, the sand-papering, making all the edges and corners to fit. knowledge of tools and processes is inevitable. if the child realizes his instinct and makes the box, there is plenty of opportunity to gain discipline and perseverance, to exercise effort in overcoming obstacles, and to attain as well a great deal of information.

so undoubtedly the little child who thinks he would like to cook has little idea of what it means or costs, or what it requires. it is simply a desire to “mess around,” perhaps to imitate the activities of older people. and it is doubtless possible to let ourselves down to that level and simply humor that interest. but here, too, if the impulse is exercised, utilized, it runs up against the actual world of hard conditions, to which it must accommodate itself; and there again come in the factors of discipline and knowledge. one of the children became impatient 56recently, at having to work things out by a long method of experimentation, and said: “why do we bother with this? let’s follow a recipe in a cook-book.” the teacher asked the children where the recipe came from, and the conversation showed that if they simply followed this they would not understand the reasons for what they were doing. they were then quite willing to go on with the experimental work. to follow that work will, indeed, give an illustration of just the point in question. their occupation happened that day to be the cooking of eggs, as making a transition from the cooking of vegetables to that of meats. in order to get a basis of comparison they first summarized the constituent food elements in the vegetables and made a preliminary comparison with those found in meat. thus they found that the woody fiber or cellulose in vegetables corresponded to the connective tissue in meat, giving the element of form and structure. they found that starch and starchy products were characteristic of the vegetables, that mineral salts were found in both alike, and that there was fat in both—a small quantity in vegetable food and a large amount in animal. they were prepared then to take up the study of albumen as the characteristic feature of animal food, corresponding to starch in the vegetables, and were ready to consider the conditions requisite for the proper treatment of albumen—the eggs serving as the material of experiment.

they experimented first by taking water at various temperatures, finding out when it was scalding, simmering, and boiling hot, and ascertained the effect of the various degrees of temperature on the white of the egg. that worked out, they were prepared, not simply to cook eggs, but to understand the principle involved in the cooking of eggs. i do not wish to lose sight of the universal in the particular incident. for the child simply to desire to cook an egg, and accordingly drop it in water for three minutes, and take it out when he is told, is not educative. but for the child to realize his own impulse by recognizing the facts, materials and conditions involved, and then to regulate his impulse through that recognition, is educative. this is the difference, upon which i wish to insist, between exciting or indulging an interest and realizing it through its direction.

another instinct of the child is the use of pencil and paper. all children like to express themselves through the medium of form and color. if you simply indulge this interest by letting the child go on indefinitely, there is no growth that is more than accidental. but let the child first express his impulse, and then through criticism, question, and suggestion bring him to 58consciousness of what he has done, and what he needs to do, and the result is quite different. here, for example, is the work of a seven-year-old child. it is not average work, it is the best work done among the little children, but it illustrates the particular principle of which i have been speaking. they had been talking about the primitive conditions of social life when people lived in caves. the child’s idea of that found expression in this way: the cave is neatly set up on the hill side in an impossible way. you see the conventional tree of childhood; a vertical line with horizontal branches on each side. if the child had been allowed to go on repeating this sort of thing day by day, he would be indulging his instinct rather than exercising it. but the child was now asked to look closely at trees, to compare those seen with the one drawn, to examine more closely and consciously into the conditions of his work. then he drew trees from observation.

finally he drew again from combined observation, memory, and imagination. he made again a free illustration, expressing his own imaginative thought, but controlled by detailed study of actual trees. the result was a scene representing a bit of forest; so far as it goes, it seems to me to have as much poetic feeling as the work of an adult, while at the same time its trees are, in their proportions possible ones, not mere symbols.

if we roughly classify the impulses which are available in the school, we may group them under four heads. there is the social instinct of the children as shown in conversation, personal intercourse, and communication. we all know how self-centered the little child is at the age of four or five. if any new subject is brought up, if he says anything at all, it is: “i have seen that;” or, “my papa or mamma told me about that.” his horizon is not large; an experience must come immediately home to him, if he is to be sufficiently interested to relate it to others and seek theirs in return. and yet the egoistic and limited interest of little children is in this manner capable of infinite expansion. the language instinct is the simplest form of the social expression of the child. hence it is a great, perhaps the greatest of all educational resources.

then there is the instinct of making—the constructive impulse. the child’s impulse to do finds expression first in play, in movement, gesture, and make-believe, becomes more definite, and seeks outlet in shaping materials into tangible forms and permanent embodiment. the child has not much instinct for abstract inquiry. the instinct of investigation seems to grow out of the combination of the constructive impulse with the 60conversational. there is no distinction between experimental science for little children and the work done in the carpenter shop. such work as they can do in physics or chemistry is not for the purpose of making technical generalizations or even arriving at abstract truths. children simply like to do things, and watch to see what will happen. but this can be taken advantage of, can be directed into ways where it gives results of value, as well as be allowed to go on at random.

and so the expressive impulse of the children, the art instinct, grows also out of the communicating and constructive instincts. it is their refinement and full manifestation. make the construction adequate, make it full, free, and flexible, give it a social motive, something to tell, and you have a work of art. take one illustration of this in connection with the textile work—sewing and weaving. the children made a primitive loom in the shop; here the constructive instinct was appealed to. then they wished to do something with this loom, to make something. it was the type of the indian loom, and they were shown blankets woven by the indians. each child made a design kindred in idea to those of the navajo blankets, and the one which seemed best adapted to the work in hand was selected. the technical resources were limited, but the coloring and form were worked out by the children. the example shown was made by the twelve-year-old children. examination shows that it took patience, thoroughness, and perseverance to do the work. it involved not merely discipline and information of both a historical sort and the elements of technical design, but also something of the spirit of art in adequately conveying an idea.

one more instance of the connection of the art side with the constructive side. the children had been studying primitive spinning and carding, when one of them, twelve years of age, made a picture of one of the older children spinning. here is another piece of work which is not quite average; it is better than the average. it is an illustration of two hands and the drawing out of the wool to get it ready for spinning. this was done by a child eleven years of age. but, upon the whole, with the younger children especially, the art impulse is connected mainly with the social instinct—the desire to tell, to represent.

now, keeping in mind these fourfold interests—the interest in conversation or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in making things, or construction; and in artistic expression—we may say they are the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child. i wish to give one or two illustrations, the first from the work of children seven years of age. it illustrates in a way the dominant desire of the children to talk, particularly about folks and of things in relation to folks. if you observe little children, you will find they are interested in the world of things mainly in its connection with people, as a background and medium of human concerns. many anthropologists have told us there are certain identities in the child interests with those of primitive life. there is a sort or natural recurrence of the child mind to the typical activities of primitive peoples; witness the hut which the boy likes to build in the yard, playing hunt, with bows, arrows, spears, and so on. again the question comes: what are we to do with this interest—are we to ignore it, or just excite and draw it out? or shall we get hold of it and direct it to something ahead, something better? some of the work that has been planned for our seven-year-old children has the latter end in view—to utilize this interest so that it shall become a means of seeing the progress of the human race. the children begin by imagining present conditions taken away until they are in contact with nature at first hand. that takes them back to a hunting people, to a people living in caves or trees and getting a precarious subsistence by hunting and fishing. they imagine as far as possible the various natural 63physical conditions adapted to that sort of life; say, a hilly, woody slope, near mountains and a river where fish would be abundant. then they go on in imagination through the hunting to the semi-agricultural stage, and through the nomadic to the settled agricultural stage. the point i wish to make is that there is abundant opportunity thus given for actual study, for inquiry which results in gaining information. so, while the instinct primarily appeals to the social side, the interest of the child in people and their doings is carried on into the larger world of reality. for example, the children had some idea of primitive weapons, of the stone arrowhead, etc. that provided occasion for the testing of materials as regards their friability, their shape, texture, etc., resulting in a lesson in mineralogy, as they examined the different stones to find which was best suited to the purpose. the discussion of the iron age supplied a demand for the construction of a smelting oven made out of clay, and of considerable size. as the children did not get their drafts right at first, the mouth of the furnace not being in proper relation to the vent, as to size and position, instruction in the principles of combustion, the nature of drafts and of fuel, was required. yet the instruction was not given ready-made; it was first needed, and then arrived at experimentally. then the children 64took some material, such as copper, and went through a series of experiments, fusing it, working it into objects; and the same experiments were made with lead and other metals. this work has been also a continuous course in geography, since the children have had to imagine and work out the various physical conditions necessary to the different forms of social life implied. what would be the physical conditions appropriate to pastoral life? to the beginning of agriculture? to fishing? what would be the natural method of exchange between these peoples? having worked out such points in conversation, they have afterward represented them in maps and sand-molding. thus they have gained ideas of the various forms of the configuration of the earth, and at the same time have seen them in their relation to human activity, so that they are not simply external facts, but are fused and welded with social conceptions regarding the life and progress of humanity. the result, to my mind, justifies completely the conviction that children, in a year of such work (of five hours a week altogether), get indefinitely more acquaintance with facts of science, geography, and anthropology than they get where information is the professed end and object, where they are simply set to learning facts in fixed lessons. as to discipline, they get more training of attention, 65more power of interpretation, of drawing inferences, of acute observation and continuous reflection, than if they were put to working out arbitrary problems simply for the sake of discipline.

i should like at this point to refer to the recitation. we all know what it has been—a placer where the child shows off to the teacher and the other children the amount of information he has succeeded in assimilating from the text-book. from this other standpoint, the recitation becomes pre?minently a social meeting place; it is to the school what the spontaneous conversation is at home, excepting that it is more organized, following definite lines. the recitation becomes the social clearing-house, where experiences and ideas are exchanged and subjected to criticism, where misconceptions are corrected, and new lines of thought and inquiry are set up.

this change of the recitation from an examination of knowledge already acquired to the free play of the children’s communicative instinct, affects and modifies all the language work of the school. under the old régime it was unquestionably a most serious problem to give the children a full and free use of language. the reason was obvious. the natural motive for language was seldom offered. in the pedagogical text-books language is defined as the medium of expressing thought. it becomes 66that, more or less, to adults with trained minds, but it hardly needs to be said that language is primarily a social thing, a means by which we give our experiences to others and get theirs again in return. when it is taken from its natural basis, it is no wonder that it becomes a complex and difficult problem to teach language. think of the absurdity of having to teach language as a thing by itself. if there is anything the child will do before he goes to school, it is to talk of the things that interest him. but when there are no vital interests appealed to in the school, when language is used simply for the repetition of lessons, it is not surprising that one of the chief difficulties of school work has come to be instruction in the mother-tongue. since the language taught is unnatural, not growing out of the real desire to communicate vital impressions and convictions, the freedom of children in its use gradually disappears, until finally the high-school teacher has to invent all kinds of devices to assist in getting any spontaneous and full use of speech. moreover, when the language instinct is appealed to in a social way, there is a continual contact with reality. the result is that the child always has something in his mind to talk about, he has something to say; he has a thought to express, and a thought is not a thought unless it is one’s own. on the traditional method, 67the child must say something that he has merely learned. there is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something. the child who has a variety of materials and facts wants to talk about them, and his language becomes more refined and full, because it is controlled and informed by realities. reading and writing, as well as the oral use of language, may be taught on this basis. it can be done in a related way, as the outgrowth of the child’s social desire to recount his experiences and get in return the experiences of others, directed always through contact with the facts and forces which determine the truth communicated.

i shall not have time to speak of the work of the older children, where the original crude instincts of construction and communication have been developed into something like scientifically directed inquiry, but i will give an illustration of the use of language following upon this experimental work. the work was on the basis of a simple experiment of the commonest sort, gradually leading the children out into geological and geographical study. the sentences that i am going to read seem to me poetic as well as “scientific.” “a long time ago when the earth was new, when it was lava, there was no water on the earth, and there was steam all round the earth up in the 68air, as there were many gases in the air. one of them was carbon dioxide. the steam became clouds, because the earth began to cool off, and after a while it began to rain, and the water came down and dissolved the carbon dioxide from the air.” there is a good deal more science in that than probably would be apparent at the outset. it represents some three months of work on the part of the child. the children kept daily and weekly records, but this is part of the summing up of the quarter’s work. i call this language poetic, because the child has a clear image and has a personal feeling for the realities imaged. i extract sentences from two other records to illustrate further the vivid use of language when there is a vivid experience back of it. “when the earth was cold enough to condense, the water, with the help of carbon dioxide, pulls the calcium out of the rocks into a large body of water where the little animals could get it.” the other reads as follows: “when the earth cooled, calcium was in the rocks. then the carbon dioxide and water united and formed a solution, and, as it ran, it tore out the calcium and carried it on to the sea, where there were little animals who took it out of solution.” the use of such words as “pulled” and “tore” in connection with the process of chemical combination evidences a personal realization which compels its own appropriate expression.

69if i had not taken so much time in my other illustrations, i should like to show how, beginning with very simple material things, the children were led on to larger fields of investigation, and to the intellectual discipline that is the accompaniment of such research. i will simply mention the experiment in which the work began. it consisted in making precipitated chalk, used for polishing metals. the children, with simple apparatus—a tumbler, lime water, and a glass tube—precipitated the calcium carbonate out of the water; and from this beginning went on to a study of the processes by which rocks of various sorts, igneous, sedimentary, etc., had been formed on the surface of the earth and the places they occupy; then to points in the geography of the united states, hawaii, and puerto rico; to the effects of these various bodies of rock, in their various configurations, upon the human occupations; so that this geological record finally rounded itself out into the life of man at the present time. the children saw and felt the connection between these geologic processes taking place ages and ages ago, and the physical conditions determining the industrial occupations of today.

of all the possibilities involved in the subject, “the school and the life of the child,” i have selected but one, because i have found that that 70one gives people more difficulty, is more of a stumbling-block, than any other. one may be ready to admit that it would be most desirable for the school to be a place in which the child should really live, and get a life-experience in which he should delight and find meaning for its own sake. but then we hear this inquiry: how, upon this basis, shall the child get the needed information; how shall he undergo the required discipline? yes, it has come to this, that with many, if not most, people the normal processes of life appear to be incompatible with getting information and discipline. so i have tried to indicate, in a highly general and inadequate way (for only the school itself, in its daily operation, could give a detailed and worthy representation), how the problem works itself out—how it is possible to lay hold upon the rudimentary instincts of human nature, and, by supplying a proper medium, so control their expression as not only to facilitate and enrich the growth of the individual child, but also to supply the results, and far more, of technical information and discipline that have been the ideals of education in the past.

but although i have selected this especial way of approach (as a concession to the question almost universally raised), i am not willing to leave the matter in this more or less negative and 71explanatory condition. life is the great thing after all; the life of the child at its time and in its measure, no less than the life of the adult. strange would it be, indeed, if intelligent and serious attention to what the child now needs and is capable of in the way of a rich, valuable, and expanded life should somehow conflict with the needs and possibilities of later, adult life. “let us live with our children,” certainly means, first of all, that our children shall live—not that they shall be hampered and stunted by being forced into all kinds of conditions, the most remote consideration of which is relevancy to the present life of the child. if we seek the kingdom of heaven, educationally, all other things shall be added unto us—which, being interpreted, is that if we identify ourselves with the real instincts and needs of childhood, and ask only after its fullest assertion and growth, the discipline and information and culture of adult life shall all come in their due season.

speaking of culture reminds me that in a way i have been speaking only of the outside of the child’s activity—only of the outward expression of his impulses toward saying, making, finding out, and creating. the real child, it hardly need be said, lives in the world of imaginative values, and ideas which find only imperfect outward embodiment. we hear much nowadays about 72the cultivation of the child’s “imagination.” then we undo much of our own talk and work by a belief that the imagination is some special part of the child, that finds its satisfaction in some one particular direction—generally speaking, that of the unreal and make-believe, of the myth and made-up story. why are we so hard of heart and so slow to believe? the imagination is the medium in which the child lives. to him there is everywhere and in everything that occupies his mind and activity at all, a surplusage of value and significance. the question of the relation of the school to the child’s life is at bottom simply this: shall we ignore this native setting and tendency, dealing not with the living child at all, but with the dead image we have erected, or shall we give it play and satisfaction? if we once believe in life and in the life of the child, then will all the occupations and uses spoken of, then will all history and science, become instruments of appeal and materials of culture to his imagination, and through that to the richness and the orderliness of his life. where we now see only the outward doing and the outward product, there, behind all visible results, is the re-adjustment of mental attitude, the enlarged and sympathetic vision, the sense of growing power, and the willing ability to identify both insight and capacity with the interests of the world and 73man. unless culture be a superficial polish, a veneering of mahogany over common wood, it surely is this—the growth of the imagination in flexibility, in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the individual lives is informed with the life of nature and of society. when nature and society can live in the schoolroom, when the forms and tools of learning are subordinated to the substance of experience, then shall there be an opportunity for this identification, and culture shall be the democratic password.