Education and the National Purpose: Forty-ninth Annual Schoolmen's Week Proceedings [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512802955

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Education and the National Purpose

University

of

Pennsylvania

Schoolmen's

Schoolmen''s

Week

Week

Meeting

October 11-14, 1961

Education and the National Purpose Forty-ninth Schoolmen's

Week

Annual Proceedings

Edited by

HELEN HUUS

Philadelphia UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

© 1962 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan by the Oxford University Press London, Bombay, and Karachi Library of Congress Catalog Card N u m b e r : 62-22191 7341 Printed in the United States of America

Editor's Preface E D U C A T I O N is important, especially for a democratic society, has long been recognized. The Report of the President's Commission on National Goals reaffirms the strategic position of education and places it in a perspective that also includes technological, economical, sociological, and cultural goals of the nation. It was to the topic of "Education and the National Purpose" that the main speakers of the 1961 Schoolmen's Week addressed themselves, and the first section of these Proceedings has this as its heading. While the thread of national purpose runs throughout many of the succeeding papers, the other sections deal somewhat more specifically with relatively smaller, more local, day-by-day problems and procedures by which this process of education actually occurs. The second section is devoted to a paper on the educational ideas of Alfred North Whitehead, not only in honor of the centennial of his birth but also because of his outstanding contribution to the philosophy of education. It is important that educators pause to ponder theoretical foundations, and the clarity of Whitehead's writings make them unusually cogent and appealing. Part III contains papers relating to innovations in education. One on programed instruction in nursing is illustrative of the interest in teaching machines, while those on "contiguous" grouping and team teaching describe only two of the current attempts to improve instruction by regrouping of personnel. The next five sections are devoted to papers dealing with various educational problems and practices. Part I V treats situations arising at the administrative level—the role of the school board, legal questions, school organization, and supervision. Part V focuses on the child in school and is comprised of articles on child growth and development, and of their relation to the teaching of arithmetic and the education of the slow learner, while Part VI contains articles in the general area THAT

5

6

EDITOR'S

PREFACE

of communications—linguistics, reading, literature, and note taking. The increased interest and demand for foreign language teaching is reflected in two papers, one reporting the status of foreign language teaching in Pennsylvania and the other a clear and vivid description of a secondary program in Latin. The space allotted to Part VII, "The Expressive Arts," should in no way be construed as indicative of the desired emphasis; it may only reflect the difficulty of putting into words the values of creative expression. This section contains one paper describing an approach to art in the elementary school and papers describing physical education and athletics in two foreign countries. Part VIII, which includes three discussions on problems in vocational education, emphasizes the need for setting up objectives, for co-operation between schools and industry, and for identifying vocational aptitudes realistically and sufficiently early that proper guidance can be given. It is fitting that this report close with an optimistic, forward look. The very short paper by the renowned Dr. I. M. Levitt serves this purpose admirably by focusing attention not only beyond the nation but beyond the world by presenting a glimpse of what the future might bring. Any program with the scope of Schoolmen's Week can only be the result of the co-operation of many individuals and groups. Those who helped in the planning and organization are listed in the back of this book, and their assistance is most greatly appreciated. Very special thanks should also go to the two program coordinators, Dr. Albert I. Oliver, Associate Professor of Education, and Dr. Eleanor M. Dillinger, Assistant Professor of Education, who organized and developed the many excellent programs relating to secondary and elementary education, respectively; to Dr. Richard Heisler, Assistant to the Dean of the Graduate School of Education, who so ably supervised the exhibits and the physical arrangements; to Mrs. Alice Lavelle, Administrative Assistant, who managed the many details with accuracy and dispatch; to Mrs. Eleanor Bennett and Miss Mildred Matlack, who were responsible for the final typing of the manuscript; and finally to all those who submitted manuscripts for publication, whether or not they could be included in these Proceedings.

Editor's

Preface

7

Not only those who attended Schoolmen's Week but other teachers, administrators, school personnel, parents, and anyone interested in education in America in 1961 should find in this report a wealth of information. We trust they find it interesting, as well. HELEN HUUS Associate Professor of Education General Chairman of Schoolmen's Week University of Pennsylvania January, 1962

Contents Editor's Preface

I.

Education

5

and the National

Purpose

Paul C. Weaver Lawrence E. Dennis

II.

Educational

Whitehead's

III.

13 29

Philosophy

Views on Education—Frederick

Innovations

in

C. Gruber

Education

Programed Instruction for Nursing—Marie M. Seedor Contiguous Grouping—W. James Drennen Team Teaching in the Elementary and Secondary Schools—Robert H. Anderson

IV.

Administration

and

57 66 70

Supervision

The School Board's Role in Public Education—Thomas G. Pullen, Jr. The Law and the Curriculum—E. Edmund Reutter, Jr. Legal Aspects of School Purchasing—H. Halleck Singer The Junior College Today—Lawrence L. Jarvie The Present Challenge for Superior Teachers—Robert H. Anderson

V.

39

85 97 103 115 124

The Student and the School

Keeping the Normal Child Normal—Rachel Dunaway Cox Patterns of Growth Affect Methods of Teaching—Laura Hooper Guiding Natural Growth in Arithmetic in the Primary Grades— Ella M. Travis Trends and Issues in the Education of the Slow Learner—Kathryn Dice Reier 9

135 151 158 173

10

VI.

CONTENTS

The Communicative

Arts

Exploring in the Language Arts—Eunice Shaed Newton New Paths in Thinking about Language Arts—Mary Elisabeth Coleman ' Developing Better Patterns of Speech in the Classroom—Mardel Ogilvie Tension on the Rope—English 1961—James R. Squire The Teaching of Creative Writing—Louise P. Kasl Two Evaluations of Notehand—Bernard S. Soika, M. Adele Frisbie Inspiring a Liking for Literature among Young Adolescents— Joseph Blake Reflective Reading and Thinking—Russell G. Stauffer Factors Associated with the Progress of Students Enrolled in a College Reading Program—J. Wesley Schneyer Status of Foreign Languages in the Elementary Schools of Pennsylvania—Louisette Logan A Latin Advanced Placement Program in a Private School—Wade C. Stephens

VII.

The Expressive

The Industrial

242 249 258 267 269

283 289 297

305 318 330

Science for the Future

Moon—Target

for Tomorrow—I.

Appendix—Schoolmen's Index

201 212 228 236

Arts

Industrial Arts Objectives and the Technical Revolution—Shriver L. Coover, James P. Harrison Public Technical Education—J. E. Casey, Maurice W. Roney Identification of Vocational Aptitudes—Thomas A. McNamara

IX.

191

Arts

Art and the Creative Process in the Elementary School—Blanche W. Jefferson ' Physical Education in Israel—Elizabeth K. Zimmerli Athletics in Southeast Asia—John H. Jenny

VIII.

185

M. Levitt

Week Committees

341 1961

345 351

I Education and the National

Purpose

Education

and the National

Purpose

PAUL C. WEAVER* IT IS A nostalgic luxury to remember the free and irresponsible province of the child. It is nice to remember flights of fancy and solving problems by not admitting them. But when we become men "we put away childish things," and the same can be said of education as it achieves increasing maturity. Whether we find it pleasant or not, mature educators must recognize that the young people now being taught will inherit a certain kind of world and that, as far as we can see, this world has problems in it—problems that are quite inescapable, problems that do not admit of easy solution, and problems that will persist throughout the adult lives of the young people in our classrooms. Let us look at three of these briefly.

PROBLEM

1

OUR W O R L D IS

SPLIT

Our world is split; it is bifurcated, philosophically and politically, largely between East and West. This problem which plagues us with black headlines every morning has some origins that must be understood. In the West, we go back for the basic taproots of our philosophy and human activities to at least two very interesting points, lost now in man's memory. One taproot goes back to the Hebrew-Christian treatment of values, where there emerged one day a bold and brash idea—that all individual persons, regardless of differential characteristics, are creatures of dignity and infinite worth. We read in the sacred writings, for example, that one little human being is so transcendentally important that even the "hairs on his head are numbered." This idea about the dignity and infinite worth of the individual slowly forged its way into the mores, into the statutes of * President, Lake Erie College. 13

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law, into the concepts of political responsibility, and into the definition of the services of the community. It emerged as the concept that each individual should be developed to his greatest potential, whatever that might be. The second taproot goes back to Roman civilization for its genesis, precisely, perhaps, because the R o m a n concept of natural law, under the impact of the Stoics, was deeply rooted in the belief, and constantly affirmed, that political power is subject to a moral referee. This was expressed by a certain view of reason as being implicit in nature, and politics as being subservient to reason in nature. This idea of the limitation of power in the affairs of man has led in the West to the development of the conception of free institutions—free labor, free education, free churches, synagogues, and temples, a free press, freedom of assembly, freedom to discuss grievances, freedom against government. W h e n each President is inaugurated, w e symbolize this subservience of government to morality not only by saluting the flag, the symbol of our political responsibility and organization, but also by having our new Head of State kiss the Bible and so pledge allegiance to moral review of political activity. These twin taproots, one about the dignity and worth of the individual and the other about the concept of moral imposition over political power and its limitations, flourished though challenged by ignorance, by political difficulty, and by metaphysical limitations. These taproots have, for two thousand years, ied our value convictions and defined for us in the West what we mean by government, what we mean by education, and how we organize for the emergence of greatness in individuals. Where did this division between East and West begin? Maybe it began with Karl Marx in that abysmally poor piece of scholarship called Das Kapital, which i m p r e s s e d most of my f r i e n d s because they failed to check the scholarly sources used by Marx. H e made fundamental errors about the mining industry in Britain, for example. However, with the oversimplification of Marx about the relative importance of economic determination in human organization, with the thinking of Kropotkin, with the strategy of Lenin, and with the statements of the international pool of the Communist party, there has emerged in modern times quite a different philosophy and quite a

Education

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15

different set of values in the East, as opposed to our taking for granted the emphasis in the West upon the individual and his worth. Communists place an emphasis upon society: not the self, but the commune—hence Communism; not the infinite worth of the individual versus the group, but the immortality alone of the social stream—hence denying the axiomatic status of an individual versus the group. They do, however, have a characteristic view about the individual within the framework of their dedication to society. In the West, until very recently, we have believed that the individual had a soul, but this was not subject to microscopic investigation. This unique and immortal character of the organism forms the defense of man's dignity and his capacity. Communism holds no such view; it has reduced the spirit of the person to biological terms and to what the scientist finds in the laboratory. He does not find the immortality; he does not find omissions. What he finds is that this individual can be made to serve the commune through the simple device of controlling the ingress and egress of the stomach and its sophisticated corollary, the purse. Like huge puppets on strings, individuals can be made to fit what the commune requires of them. As over against our taproot of moral review of politics and the limitation of power of government in the affairs of men, Communism deeply believes that this is bad organization, that it is unfitting to modern times, and that what is required, instead, is the total responsibility to the government for all the lives of the people absolutely, not subject to the diversity of alteration or successful challenge— hence, the censorship of books. What people read is important to the government; therefore, it is the government's business to say what shall be read. It is the government's responsibility to educate the youth in Russia; hence it is the government's right to say who goes to which school, in what field students major, and where they go to work afterward. Freedom of the press to them is a very ridiculous weakness. In their view of things, religion is an opiate. In other words, the Politburo has absolute power with no review. These opposing and contradictory notions about the nature of man and the proper role of government are locked in perhaps the most exhaustive and imaginative contest for the minds of men that the world has ever seen. From an educator's point of view—we who

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d e a l with the length a n d persepctive of the potential of e a c h emergent g e n e r a t i o n — i t is incidental that there is today a crisis in Berlin, m a y b e t o m o r r o w in V i e t n a m , m a y b e C u b a again, m a y b e the Congo. T h e e d u c a t o r w h o h a s a sense of history and a n o t i o n of his responsibility t o the national p u r p o s e d o e s not e d u c a t e by the passing headlines a n d by the s y m p t o m s that keep p o p p i n g u p a n d will keep p o p p i n g u p t h r o u g h o u t the lives of the children n o w in school; f o r as e d u c a t o r s we see that the n a t u r e of m a n a n d the role of governm e n t is the overwhelming p r o b l e m of the h u m a n race. It d o e s not a d m i t an easy solution, and it will persist.

PROBLEM

2

OUR

W O R L D IS

DANGEROUS

N o t only is m a n k i n d ' s world split and in contest to control the m i n d s of men but the world is dangerous, and its d a n g e r is increasing daily. O n e d a y in E u r o p e , while chatting with a very sophisticated F r e n c h m a n with a delightful sense of h u m o r , I first learned that the w h o l e world does not regard A m e r i c a n efficiency as i m p o r t a n t . Some regard it as a definite h i n d r a n c e to the d e v e l o p m e n t of a good society, a n d he was b e m o a n i n g the fact that A m e r i c a n inventiveness h a d so cruelly changed the contest of war. He put it in these w o r d s : "1 hope y o u A m e r i c a n s d o n ' t feel you are doing us a great t u r n with this M a r s h a l l Aid. I think you can figure out why this M a r s h a l l Aid is n e e d e d over here. Y o u know, it used to be that you shoot a little bit, then the British stop f o r tea, the G e r m a n s stop f o r beer, a n d the F r e n c h stop for wine. W h e n it is d a r k , you go to b e d and sleep, then get up and shoot a little more. W h e n you get it out of your system, you go back to y o u r homes. Y o u have wasted a little gunp o w d e r and a few people have died. But all that h a s n o w been c h a n g e d by A m e r i c a n efficiency. Y o u invented the a i r p l a n e ; you invented the tank, the inccndiary b o m b , atomic p o w e r . A n d , lo and behold, what h a p p e n s ? We have a war over here. W e are used to t h e m . Y o u have m a d e war so d a n g e r o u s and destructive t h a t after we shoot a little bit, we c a n n o t raise vegetables, our cities are d o w n , a n d we need this M a r s h a l l Aid. If you had been less efficient, we w o u l d not need it, a n d the world would not be so d a n g e r o u s . " Be that as it may, the fact r e m a i n s that the a p p l i c a t i o n s of seien-

Education

and the National

Purpose

17

tific discoveries to modern technology and weaponry have introduced a new element in the thinking of mankind. A number of years ago, as I walked about the campus of the University of Chicago, I happened along the side of old Stagg Stadium. As 1 came around the squat end of this old pock-marked stadium, a ray of light through the curling mist caught my eye. Walking close, I saw a new bronze plaque stating that on December 2, 1942, mankind here first achieved a chain reaction and nuclear fission and ushered in the new age. It is an age of great and prodigious power. The atomic age puts into the hands of man, potentially, the solution to one of the root causes of war, which is the need of the have-not nations for power to run an industrial civilization. We can ship Germany, in a suitcase, more power than ten thousand men can dig out of the earth to be transformed from coal into power for industry. There need not be, in this sense, have-not nations any more. In Sunday School we read in the New Testament about the grain of mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, that when used can move mountains. Now we can move mountains with atomic power of about the size of a grain of mustard. So we are in the age, the technological age, and therefore face the danger of unlimited manipulatory power in the hands of man. Although we have not yet learned how to live together in the h u m a n race, the atom bomb keeps ticking away, with the hydrogen b o m b following it, then the cobalt bomb, and following it, in turn, the direct use of helium, which Dr. Millikan predicted the year before his death. In Time Magazine last year there was a story and picture of a oneinch bar of steel cut by a reflection of light without being touched. These bombs keep ticking away. . . . Would you consider me romantic if 1 say sensitive men, reflective men, men with historical perspective, men with a belief in the future of mankind, hear the metallic words? The bomb ticks off, and perhaps the words are these: "People of the earth, grow up. Grow up over night, if need be. There isn't much time." The engineer in the national laboratory, speaking of casualties in the event of an atomic war, has reported in an open meeting that if a hydrogen-powered bomb of the type we have detonated experi-

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mentally many times, not what Khrushchev is threatening to use, were to be dropped over the city of Philadelphia today, within a diameter of a mile and a half of its impact the temperature would become 2000 degrees Fahernheit within eleven seconds. So save your b o m b shelters, because what is going to be there is a crater 2 1 8 feet deep at the center, filled with poisonous liquid. What had been buildings of steel and stone, what had been human bodies, and what had been students-in-learning and tcachers-teaching-students will have instantaneously been transformed into microscopic material which, carried by the wind, constitutes the fall-out, dangerously wild. This is a problem we cannot duck. What the solution is, I do not know; I am sure it is not easy, and I am sure we are not going to stop our scientific advances. So the weapons are going to get more dangerous. Now I want to make a statement and be quite sure that I am not misunderstood. I am not speaking to the current political situation and the frightful problems our government faces in its inability to formulate a foreign policy that is effective without great danger, but I am speaking to the next half-century; not to the party in power, but to ideas, human reason, and the potentiality of mankind to survive by wisdom. Then I say that this world is so dangerous that, in the long run, it perhaps is of no service to mankind. It keeps pointing to the vigor of our body military, to the biceps of our national strength. We need to be strong—stronger than we are—but we need a great deal more than that. We need something that the educator needs to supply. I am all for mathematicians, but maybe in retrospect we need poets more. I am all for science and its great liberating potential from toil and disease and economic stress, but maybe we need composers and artists just as badly. Certainly in terms of the national purpose, not one of us wishes the teachers of America to become the captive tool of either the Pentagon or the State Department, both of whom we honor; and, in crisis, we lay down our books to serve our country with love and courage. But the educator is always dealing with the next half-century, and in that sense do we yet know enough to achieve what the world must have in light of its precipitous and growing danger?

Education

and the National

Purpose

PROBLEM

3

SHRINKING

OUR

WORLD

IS

19

Not only is our world split and in contest for keeps, and not only is our world dangerous and daily more so, but, in the third place, the world is shrinking. The distances separating people are disappearing with such great speed that we are almost caught flatfooted by our provincialism and our lack of insight in understanding the driving forces in people who hunger now for dignity and progress in this shrinking, suddenly tiny world. An executive of one of the major airlines has indicated that he expects by 1 9 6 5 to have regularly scheduled flights from London to New York in an hour and fifty-eight minutes. We have just been reading about and have seen X - 1 5 on T V . When the "bugs" are out of it, the anticipated speed is seven thousand miles an hour. Instantaneous communication, great speeds in transportation, the exploding population of the world, increased longevity due to the beneficent powers of medical science are crowding the world so close together with such sudden interdependence that we may not yet have learned to educate for it, and maybe our involvement is way ahead of our insight. Morality and wisdom, and the difference between these, is what really threatens us. Certainly human understanding and human relations are increasingly important, whether between labor and management, black and white, Christian and Moslem, or a member of one national group and another. We are plagued by the absence of a real art of understanding, by fictional problems and by symptomatic problems, and on both we waste our time. A fictional problem is one we have because we believe a fiction about another person. For example, it is very difficult in this shrinking world not to be caught with generalizations made in a previous day when there was less opportunity for contact, less opportunity to get the facts. Even in 1961, relatively enlightened people, including some who have the Ph.D. degree, believe these kinds of fictions. Let me quote a few. " T h e Germans are arrogant and they are always going to cause a lot of trouble." " T h e British are cold." " T h e French drink too much." "Orientals are tricky and

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not to be trusted." "Colored people have primitive instincts." What a sorry thing this is! We educate the present generation to fictional problems in this shrinking world to which they are going to have to adjust. A symptomatic problem is just as bad. It is a problem we have because we do not know who we are. Being insecure in our ego identification, we are suspicious of every other ego. Some of our periodic national hysteria about Communism may be based upon our own weakness of faith and lack of understanding of what Democracy actually is. If education is to serve the national purpose and if we pull the national purpose out of the current political problems that harass us to get the perspective, then is it not a responsibility of education to make at least this contribution—a new level of understanding of the problems the world cannot escape? A year or so before his retirement from the Presidency of the United States, Mr. Eisenhower addressed a group of college presidents at a meeting in Washington. He said recently, "I had twentysix thousand experts study a certain part of the world for three and a half months, and within ten minutes of the announcement of a policy, every little radio commentator in America was telling the American people what was wrong with it. They hadn't been there; they didn't have the facts." He said, "Gentlemen, forgive me. It's hard to be President of the United States with the vast ignorance that's implicit about the world." T h e n he turned to us and spoke these moving words: "Gentlemen, go back to your college campuses and teach this generation of students to understand the new world in which we live, and if you cannot teach them that, I don't think it matters if you teach them anything else."

BARRIERS

TO

WORLD

UNDERSTANDING

What are some of the barriers to understanding our time, our world, and our responsibilities? What are some of the barriers that involve us in fictional and symptomatic problems when the real problems are difficult enough? Provincialism. O n e barrier is our provincial incapacity as a nation to deal with diversity in value convictions without surrendering the

Education

and the National

Purpose

21

body of our own motivation. Perhaps this can be stated more simply. In a shrunken world that is dangerous and split, wise men must not be blinded from understanding one another. Our inability to accommodate the notion of diversity in value hierarchies pushes us into all kinds of fictional and symptomatic problems. Let me refer again to the matter of efficiency. My assignment of status to the American value of efficiency may be accurate or not; certainly it is high. I think it is the first value in America. We love efficiency; we are proud of it; it has given us enormously materialistic results. Why are we like that? Because we are a very new country. The Pilgrims on the Mayflower came over and found forests and deserts. We moved west fast. We made the desert blossom as a rose; we felled the forest; we drove the standard of living per capita up beyond the proudest dreams of men of the last generation. We have done this by being efficient. But now there are people in the world, in this shrinking world, whom we must understand and with whom we must work who simply do not accept this—the French, for example. They have efficiency near the bottom of their scale of values. One day in a hotel in Paris I called the concierge to tell him I wanted to telephone a friend of mine from New York who was that day arriving at a hotel in Zurich, Switzerland. He said, "Right away." Now a French concierge uses the words "right away" whenever he realizes he is talking to an American. It has no other relationship to reality that I have been able to determine. It was Tuesday when I placed my call. I sat beside the telephone most of the afternoon and thought, "Now, Paul Weaver, don't be impatient. You are an American; you are used to plumbing, to everything being organized; don't be a thorn in the side of the French." So I was no thorn Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday. On Friday, I walked out to the desk and said to the concierge, "Will you be good enough, while I wait here, to determine whether we ever got Switzerland; if Switzerland, Zurich; if Zurich, the hotel; if the hotel, my friend; if not, when I might expect the call?" In a very relaxed fashion he said, "What do you want to talk to him for?" I said, "I beg your pardon?" He said, "Why don't you let him alone? He's over in Switzerland,

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where even in the summer the mountains are covered with snow. We hope he's looking at them. You should be out in the garden with the twitchering. See him when you get back in the fall." He went on, "This is an American invention. It doesn't work well in Europe. Maybe there was an avalanche; maybe the lines are down. How do I know? But is this conversation important? Now," said he, "Dr. Weaver, I want to talk to you. You're a busy man and you may not move in and out, but you do everything in a day and you are a typical American. Can you explain to me why Americans are like that?" "Well," I said, "I think that the Americans respect time." "Now," he said, "Do you? How much time do you get in America by respecting it? We get three score years and ten, in France. How much do you get?" "Well," I said, "If you put it that way, we get three score years and ten, too." He said, "No, you don't; because of your efficiency you get heart attacks beginning at forty-two, and a lot of you don't get your three score years and ten. You know, the whole world would be better off if you took longer to eat in America." This seemed to be a brilliant non sequitur. "You are going to have to explain that," I said. He said, "You have lunch in twenty minutes. I understand (horrible thought!) that in New York the restaurants don't even have chairs. You just stand up and they give you food, and you pass by and go back to work. Think of the poor stomach! Dr. Weaver, the French chef for six hundred years, longer than your own country, has studied the exact flow of the gastric juices in the human stomach. It takes two hours to eat right. But the American comes over here, and with the French serving food exactly timed with digestive necessity, kicks the table and says, 'Slow service.' So, when the Americans come, we just throw the food at them." I am interested, because I am told by the medical profession, or at least some of them, that perhaps the longest preconditioning factor in upper respiratory diseases and diseases of the heart is an inwardness of "feeling behind"—the inwardness of daily hurry. I am interested when a girl from Lake Erie College comes back

Education

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23

from her winter term abroad in France, comes into my office and says, "President Weaver, I don't have a problem; may I come to see you anyway?" I said, "Yes, please do." She continued, "1 want to chat a little bit. 1 was only in France one term, but you know, sir, I am lonely for it." "Can you tell me why?" I asked. "Yes, sir, I can," she said. "In all the time I lived with my French family, do you know that neither father, nor mother, nor child ever left the house after dinner in the evening? We sat around the table from eight until ten-thirty, and every night every member of the family reported to everybody else what happened to them that they were glad for while they had been separated." Then, dropping back to her early adolescence, she said, "Gee whiz, President Weaver! a meal in my French family was like communion in an American church." The point I am making is not to praise French culture. The point is that all we need in the educative process is to teach the young to be nonprovincial. It is possible that one of the contributions to national purpose is a new humility, a new sense of curiosity, a search for a new world culture with diversity in it, and that out of this diversity all of life can be enriched. Maybe one day peace will come. The educator is not the captive tool of the State Department; he has responsibilities to God, and to the knowledge he possesses, and to the philosophical implications to man's past, and to the projection of man's possibilities tomorrow. Diversity in values can strengthen the human race, but we must learn about it; we must have humility— not self-abnegation or self-effacement, not absence of conviction and incapacity for action, but the inexhaustible capacity to learn, for a humble person never knows it all. The arrogant, stubborn, closed mind defies intelligent national purpose as we move forward. Communication. Another barrier is that of communication, when human beings cannot talk to each other clearly. And what an opportunity for fictional and symptomatic problems, when the real problems themselves are big enough! One evening outside Denmark some years ago at a dinner party in honor of Mrs. Weaver and myself we were in a receiving line with our host. Although English has

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been a requirement in the Danish schools since 1917, I think, the last couple to greet us were old Danes, and they had gone to school before this was a requirement. So they stopped; there was no pressure of a line remaining, and we were people of good will. We shook hands and smiled with increasing vacuity at one another. My wife bowed and I bowed; the Dane bowed and his wife bowed. We smiled, and I said, "It's a beautiful evening." He really did not know what I was saying. His eyes went blank and he said something in Danish. I said, "Yes, of course." I did not know what he had said. We did not know what to do with each other—no communication. Finally I said rather loudly, " D e n m a r k is a lovely country." My wife nudged me and said, "They're not deaf. They're Danes." Sometimes we are deaf to all the implications of what we already know if we do not solve the barrier of communication. Here are two modest proposals. The world is small enough that we ought to drop the word "foreign" from the Language Department. "Foreign language" was appropriate in the day of the steamship but it is hardly appropriate now, and perhaps by sheer inadvertence something would happen to our attitudes if we talked about the mother tongue and the second or third language to be learned. "Foreign" means "remote, strange, not mine, not familiar," and from this the psychological jump "to be suspected, to be looked down upon, to be frightened of" is easy to take. Since the learning of the second and third languages is premised upon one's mastery of grammar and the mother tongue, my first proposal is for each of us to learn the English language to the limit of his capacity, including an emphasis upon the beauty and power of words, not as ends in themselves but as communicators between men that must understand each other in a shrinking world. T h e n second, we might really review what is the right time to teach a second language, whether it is French. Italian, Spanish, or German. I have a suspicion that the earlier begun the more accurate the ear and the more manipulatory the tongue and the lips. But this world is split; this is not boasting—this is reluctant acceptance of the fact that the freedom of the next thousand years disproportionately hangs on what this nation does. I do not quite see how anything less than bilinguality will do, and the second language must be learned

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as a language to be spoken and heard and read and written at normal speed. A second language is a tool of communication. It may have other virtues, but if it lacks this one in our kind of world, it is as dross and is nothing. The teachers of America are our most unsung heroes. True, they may be underpaid, but let us stop talking about it and act on it; let us not be convinced and still be thinking about it all the time. Let us, instead, think about the power and greatness of teaching, the greatest romance permitted to human beings—to deal with tomorrow and its infinite possibilities through human beings. Is there anything as creative anywhere else in our society? Now, I like these increments of pay that go up, even upon submitted evidence that some one trotted to some Sears Roebuck of summer learning and got a few more hours. I am not against extra work, and I am all for graduate studies; I think it is fine to do it part-time. But in this kind of world I would rather see teachers go to the Riviera some summer. Go out, if you can, to some place in the world where, as Thornton Wilder says, "They not only don't speak English; they don't wish to." Discover a culture, not American, and try to communicate, no matter how painful it is; because the worse you are in language the more humble you appear as a traveling American. You sound confused and uncertain, and most of the world believes this cannot happen to an American. When we travel, we make everyone speak English because of the power of our dollar, or the power of the cigarette, or the power of something else; so we always sound confident. We are in our mother tongue while everyone else is in a second language for them and, therefore, they sound confused and a bit stupid. A reverse role would be good for the pcace of the world and for the elimination of this kind of barrier. Scholarship. Finally, education can work to erase a third barrier by doing everything in its power to teach the rising generation to improve scholarship and to be internationally informed regarding the history and cultures of many peoples. In graduate school, college, secondary, and elementary grades, we have studied chiefly our own history. In 1949 it was my privilege to serve at an international seminar in Europe to which scholars from fourteen different countries had been invited. O u r task was to plot the road of the University in food

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supply and city rebuilding following the war. Most of the students in this seminar had Ph.D.'s and were agricultural experts, architects, and others with similar qualifications. One man on our faculty, an American expert, had written nine books, was a consultant to our government, and had never been outside of the Continental United States before. He said to me, "I want you to know that I tried to remedy my ignorance. I came ten days early to Europe, and I flew f r o m Italy to England." He gave his lectures on food supply, which were brilliant. One day he went very American and said, "Forgive me, but you do not know how to raise crops in Europe. 1 covered E u r o p e from Italy to England. You don't rotate your crops, and unless you leam to do so you're going to have an inadequate food supply whenever the channel is cut off by submarines, in America, we rotate crops. In the State of Kansas we have the highest production of wheat the world has ever seen. We do it ail by rotating crops.'' At the end of the lecture a very suave Dane said, "Will the learned professor indicate the yield of wheat per acre in Kansas?" A n d the professor from America rattled it off. Then the Dane said, " T h a n k you very much." When I was later in the office dictating letters, I asked my secretary, who took shorthand in five languages at the age of nineteen, why the Dane had stopped the conversation. " O h , " she said, "you see, the Danish yield of wheat is occasionally ten per cent above that, and it seemed impolite to say it to the American." This man's scholarship about American practice was valid. But his statement that the yield he mentioned was the greatest in the world had not been substantiated, and he was, in this area, a very ignorant, uninformed person. N o t just our own history, not just our own experience. . . . A n Italian expert from Naples asked the second question of the lecturer on rotation of crops. H e said, "Will the learned professor please indicate how to rotate the crop of olive trees?" Our national experience in America has much to contribute to most of the world. We can count perhaps in the tens of millions the squeezed little people of the earth who want more than anything else the degree of dignity we give one another and a more just share in the world's

Education

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27

goods and services. We have a great deal of know-how to share; we have much to contribute; but if we are to avoid fictional and symptomatic problems and if the national purpose is to be advanced in terms of our effective role we must become nonprovincial in our scholarship. The head of the Architectural Institute in Helsinki, Finland, also lectured at the seminar already mentioned. He spoke six languages fluently, but English was not among them. When he consented to give his ten lectures he discovered there would be American delegates. So he learned English and lectured in English. When he described the new cities in his country, the wide streets were pointed out as a special feature. I whispered, "Automobiles." The professor replied, "Please to forgive. Finland is a producer of lumber. Last war, one bomb burned a whole city. Broad streets are for fire break, so that not the whole city will be burned the next time a bomb falls." We whose cut of sky has not been darkened by war would do well to try to understand the hardships of modern war. I would like to think that we are educating a generation for such breadth of view and such nonprovincial concentration on our own history that if there were a Berlin crisis tomorrow none of our students would say, "What's wrong with the British and the French? Are they weak?" Their cities have been bombed; ours have not. We cannot point the finger. To thousands of mothers in France, for example, one son in six is lost. In other parts of the world the statistics are similar. SUMMARY

To sum up: I have given you a plea, and the plea is twofold. As we progressively define the national purpose in our nervous and bewildering world, may we who teach the young and have studied the history of man contribute our share to the national purpose's definition. Second, may we do what we can to teach the young to understand this new world without rose-colored glasses, without smoke-colored glasses, and let them naturally grow into members of the human race, in the hope, in the words of Judge Curtis Bok of Philadelphia, that one day we may all walk with the light of the past falling over

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our shoulders, not in our eyes; that we may all be interested in what is vital and new in the world, not alone because it is new but in the hope, perhaps, that one day nothing will be old or outworn beneath the timeless sun. May we all become poised between stinginess and display at a point called "sharing," between pride and abasement at a point called "acceptance," between cynicism and sentimentality at a point called "forgiveness," between fear and hate at a point called "love," and between cruelty and submission at a point called "tenderness," with the strength to husband it.

Education and the National

Purpose

LAWRENCE E. DENNIS» is more overriding or more important to educators in our time than the theme, "Education and the National Purpose." We live, as President Kennedy recently reminded us, "not only in a time of peril but in a generation of peril." The tension that overhangs the world is not tension that we must accustom ourselves to for just this month, or for this year, or even for just this decade, but tension that is going to be with us in one form or another for at least our entire lifetime—and perhaps that of our children. Let us reflect momentarily on the perspective we as educators should develop as we contemplate our role in formulating and carrying out programs of education that are interrelated to the national purpose. Put this perspective in terms of the children, the young men and women with whom it is our privilege to work and our duty to serve. The children who entered first grade in the fall of 1961 were probably born in 1955, after the Korean War had been concluded. Those who entered high school this year were probably born in 1949, the year of the Berlin blockade. The high school class that will graduate in the spring—the Class of 1962—was born about the time many of their fathers were on Omaha and Utah Beaches on D-Day in 1944. The college class that will graduate next year—this year's seniors in college—were born in the period 1939-41, subsequent to Germany's attack on Poland at the beginning of World War II and prior to Pearl Harbor. This year's college class, the graduates of 1962, will be among the parents of the Class of 1984. Men and women in that class will be in the flower of their careers in the twenty-first century. If there is one thread that weaves through this brief perspective it is that all of those who are presently in one branch or another of our educational system, from kindergarten SURELY NO THEME

4

Associate Director, U . S. Peace Corps, Washington, D . C. 29

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through collegc, have now lived in a world that has been at war in one form or another for well over two decades, a period in which their lives have been formed and their education shaped by the tension that has dominated the international scene. T h e basic question all of us are concerned with today is simply the question of whether we are educating our children and young men and women of today for their role of tomorrow, for their role in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first half of the twentyfirst, or whether we are in fact actually educating them for the world of yesterday. If there is one thought that has dominated my mind in the past few months in Washington it has been that we in education have simply not yet grasped fully the pace of events in the international scene. Neither have we grasped fully the impact of science and technology on public policy. There was a time, not so very long ago, not more than a decade ago as a matter of fact, when the Secretaries of State and Defense scarcely had to pay any heed to counsel or advice from the scientific community. I doubt if Secretary of State Hull, or Secretary Stettinius, or even Secretary Byrnes in the late forties had to consider the judgments of scientists before making public policy. Yet the fact of the matter today is that the Secretaries of State and Defense cannot formulate any judgment without first checking very carefully their judgments against those of the scientific community. It is my considered opinion that fundamental to our task as educators is the responsibility to train for public leadership. I also believe that wc have failed in our task unless we educate today's young men and women to assume leadership roles not for yesterday's world but for the society of tomorrow. It must be a paramount aim of all education, in terms of the national purpose, to train men and women for public responsibility. It is also, regrettably, my conviction that we are failing dismally to educate our young people for public responsibility and f o r public service. This judgment was formed principally on the basis of a series of interviews a number of us were privileged to conduct for T h e F u n d for Adult Education three years ago—interviews soon to be published under the title "Education for Public Responsibility." We learned in our discussions with leading public officials of our

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time—governors, senators, mayors, cabinet officers—that thev believed their own education had failed to equip them for their tasks in public leadership; for when we asked them whether or not they felt that their education in high school and college had equipped them to serve competently in positions of public responsibility, whether in the city, or in the state, or at the national or international level, almost all these men and women in public life responded, "No." They responded that not only had their education failed to ready them for the kind of life they have had to lead as public officials, or to face the decisions that they are called upon to make, but that in many cases it had even handicapped them. Their education had not, in other words, prepared them to serve in the society in which we now live, the society in which science and technology play such a tremendous role, the society in which we seem tragically to believe that we can turn out a specialist without any regard to his public responsibilities. It is my theme, therefore, that it is education's imperative contribution to the national purpose to prepare the next generation for public service; that this connotes a commitment to public responsibility; that we are not doing this job well now; but that in the Peace Corps we have suddenly at our disposal a vehicle for internationalizing education, and also for training young men and women for positions of public responsibility. It is a privilege, therefore, to be able to discuss the Peace Corps with you here in this city and on the University of Pennsylvania campus, for it was a distinguished Philadelphia businessman, Mr. Milton Shapp, who helped generate the idea of the Peace Corps in last year's presidential campaign. Similarly, President Gaylord Harnwell of the University of Pennsylvania has taken the lead nationally in the American Council on Education, as chairman of its Peace Corps Committee, by working in partnership with those of us on the Peace Corps staff as we formulate our basic selection and training policies. Today's young men and women are seeking to find something above and beyond themselves with which to identify and which will give meaning to their personal lives. They are asking themselves what they can do for their country, as the President has enjoined us

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all to do. President Kennedy, underscoring the basic foreign-policy lines that thread their way back to the forties, has called o>n the American people to bear the burden of the long twilight stiruggle against the common enemies of man—tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. The Peace Corps has been conceived as the key component of the weapons system in that struggle. It envisions a crew of trained American men and women sent overseas by the United States government or by private organizations and institutions to help foreign countries meet their urgent needs for skilled manpower—men and women with the skill to teach the young and assist in the operation of development projects, men and women with the capacity to cope with the demands of swiftly evolving economies and with the dedication to put that capacity to work in the villages, the mountains, the homes, and the factories of dozens of struggling nations. But the Peace Corps is more than just another dimension to our foreign-aid program, which is now well over a decade old. For the first time in history, the Congress of the United States, in passing the Peace Corps legislation and in making the Peace Corps a permanent branch of the government, has affirmed that public service abroad is in the national as well as the international interest. As outlined in the President's message to Congress, Peace Corps Volunteers are to be made available to developing nations in the following ways: through private voluntary agencies carrying on international assistance programs; through overseas programs of colleges and universities; through assistance programs of international agencies; through assistance programs of the United States Government; and through new programs which the Peace Corps itself directly administers. Nearly a year has now passed since the President established the Peace Corps on a pilot basis by executive order. What have we learned in that time? We know, first of all, a great deal more about the need for Peace Corps Volunteers which manifests itself in the economies of less developed countries of the Far East, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This need for trained manpower spans a wide variety of fields, including surveying, geology, civil engineering, agronomy, animal husbandry, community development, nursing,

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home economics, entymology, public health, sanitation, health technology, law, social work, forestry, public administration, business management, and, most important of all, teaching. In every country visited by the Director of the Peace Corps, Mr. Sargent Shriver, on his trips abroad this year, the need for elementary and secondary teachers and teaching aides was given top priority by the leaders of the host governments. As a matter of fact, education in the new nations of the world is more than just a need! It is a passion, an all-consuming desire that needs to be satisfied; it is the same burning thirst for knowledge that has given freedom its thrust in all the epochs of history. We Americans have never been strangers to this passion. We have the same responsibility to nourish it and inflame it elsewhere as we have here at home. We know, in the second place, that Peace Corps Volunteers are not only needed but wanted overseas. Peace Corps projects have already been negotiated with governments or private agencies in Tanganyika, Colombia, the Philippines, Chile, Ghana, India, West and East Pakistan, St. Lucia in the West Indies, Thailand, Malaya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Brazil, and El Salvador. There is no question now but that we will have at least seven hundred and fifty Peace Corps Volunteers trained and on assignment overseas by the end of 1961, which is above the goal of five hundred originally established by President Kennedy. By this time next year we contemplate having some forty-five hundred Peace Corps Volunteers either in training or on assignment overseas. We have also learned some things about the kind of training Peace Corps Volunteers must have if they are to work successfully in their overseas assignments. For work, of course, is what the Peace Corps is all about. A developing nation wants the job done. They want it done well. They are in a hurry. They want to learn how to do it themselves. We have volunteered to help them. To accomplish this task the Peace Corps Volunteer must know how to do it, how to teach it, and the time table for getting the job done. But there are crucial elements other than technical skill that will contribute to the Volunteer's maximum effectiveness overseas. He must be in top physical condition; he must know his own capacities,

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the demands of the job, and the nature of the setting. He must learn how to live at the level of his counterparts in the society in which he is working. He must know how to raise the level of their aspirations rather than threaten them. He must have a mastery of the language of the host country sufficient for social understanding. He must comprehend his own country's history and the role America plays in the world scene. He must be familiar with the culture to which he has been assigned. He must be equipped to cope with political, emotional, and physical stress. In other words, the Peace Corps training program—for whatever project—is comprehensive, balanced, and rigorous. The Peace Corps Volunteer serves abroad as a representative of his country. The way he conducts himself while in service overseas will reflect the values in which he believes, the way of life he holds most precious. Fourth, we also know now, from the tremendous public response to the Peace Corps, that there is a deep reservoir of motivation toward public service among people from every walk of life in this country, regardless of age or status. As Secretary Rusk has said, the Peace Corps concept of "learning through service abroad" is a "sparkling" new idea, dramatically and fully consistent with our basic ideals. I submit that we should not be surprised at the enthusiastic response to the Peace Corps—at this deep commitment to the concept of public service on the part of the American people. For there has been frustration in the American heart, and it has mounted slowly, through wars both cold and hot, in a revolutionary age where anxiety substitutes for peace and machines supplant men. For almost a generation now we have been groping to find again the path of American purpose. It has been there all along, of course, and we needed only to part the underbrush to discover it. As a nation, we were always happiest when we had a sense of physical mission, when we had something to do above and beyond self. As long as the frontier could be pushed farther back at home, we had it—"happiness in the doing," as one commentator phrased it, "and not in the deed." The fullest meaning of the Peace Corps to modern America is that we can busy ourselves

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in the doing once again, not only in this country, nor in this continent alone, but in half the world itself. In addition, we know that we cannot transplant a culture to the millions of people in the world's underdeveloped nations who are only now beginning to realize and to ask what can be theirs in terms of health and learning and opportunity. Their way of life, of course, must be their own; it must be indigenous to their native soil. But we can help them get started and work with them to achieve a better way of life. The mission of the Peace Corps, then, can be a moral and blessed mission that could occupy us an entire lifetime. Though it is fraught with many pitfalls, as I am sure all of you realize, and could, if improperly handled, result in dismal failure, the Peace Corps in its greatest perspective and in terms of the national purpose can give us the emphasis, the thrust which we need in order to find ourselves. Last week, this week, and in the weeks ahead a few hundred wellselected young Americans with some degree of skill in surveying, geology, engineering, languages, community development, teaching, sanitation, or crop rotation are arriving by car, jeep, or land rover in a tiny fraction of the towns and villages of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The full blaze of human-interest publicity will focus on them for a while. Somehow, at some point in time, the ideas that have motivated them toward volunteering for service abroad will all shake down and work, if only for the reason that most Americans anywhere cannot abide failure and believe that any problem can be solved. But long before that time arrives the feature writers and the cameramen will have turned their attention away. The Volunteers will no longer feel like heroes or martyrs, even to themselves. The pain and the heat and the drudgery and the local microbes will have attacked their bones. But they will plod ahead, if they have been rigorously selected (as we are confident they have been), feeling both sympathetic and superior, perhaps, about those who could not take it, and they will come home at the end of their two years of service, as their fathers or brothers who stayed the course of the war came home— older than their years, stronger than they were, privately aware that they are rightful owners of a little, special piece of their country's

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future. And if some friendly critic should one day pass by and say, " M y friend, how good a job do you really think you have made of it all?" the Peace Corps Volunteer can answer, " I know as well as you that this is not of highest quality, but I did put into it whatever I had. And that was the game I started out to play."

II Educational

Philosophy

Whitehead's

Views on Education

FREDERICK C. GRUBER * in this paper is to present Whitehead's thoughts on Education as he expressed them in his many writings. I have tried to let the philosopher speak for himself and have interjected my own thoughts only as they seem to me to illuminate the quotations or to serve as connections between them. After giving a brief account of Whitehead's life, I have organized the quotations under the general headings of Aims and Purposes of Education, Curriculum, and Methods. It has been difficult to refrain from commenting upon the quotations, for all of them deserve extended treatment. The temptation to compare Whitehead with other philosophers of education or to offer a critique of my own has also been resisted. It is my hope that those who are not acquainted with Whitehead's works will be inspired to read him for themselves, especially The Aims of Education and Other Essays,1 and that those already familiar with his writings may meet familiar passages in new connotations and will be stimulated to analyze further their implications for American schools.

M Y PURPOSE

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

"Whitehead's is a three volume life," writes Lucien Price. "Volume I, Cambridge University; Volume II, London; Volume III, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also said that he had a sense of having lived three lives in three successive epochs; the first from 1861 to * Professor of Education, University of Pennsylvania. Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other York: The New American Library, Tenth Printing, 1960). 39

1

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(New

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1914; the second during the war of 1914-1918; and the third, after that first world war." 2 F r o m his autobiographical notes 3 we learn that he was born on February 15, 1861, in an English vicarage at Ramsgate on the Isle of Thanet, in Kent. The family had been engaged in education, religion, and government service for several generations. Archbishop Tait, Sir Moses Montefiore, and many others prominent in English intellectual and social life were frequent visitors, and as a small boy Whitehead accompanied his father in making the rounds of his large parish, where he gained a deep sympathy and understanding of the life and problems of the folk of rural England. By the time he left for school, he had experienced the past of England in the archeological remains of the Romans, the Saxons, and the Normans and had seen history-in-the-making in the conversation of the great men who sat around his father's board. At fifteen, he was sent off to Sherborne School, in Dorsetshire, which was founded in 741 and claimed Alfred the Great as a pupil. H e r e he read the Latin and Greek authors, studied mathematics, participated in sports and in school government, and found time to read English poetry and history. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1880, and continued there as scholar, fellow, and senior lecturer without interruption until 1910. His many academic and administrative posts in the schools of the University of London gave him the opportunity to apply his knowledge of mathematics to technical fields, and gave him insight into an industrial civilization. "His invitation to Harvard came in 1924, a complete surprise. T h e letter was handed him by his wife on an afternoon which was dismal without and within. He read it as they sat by their fire, then handed it to her. She read it, and asked, 'What do you think of it?' To her astonishment he said, Ί would rather do that than anything in the world.' " 4 At H a r v a r d he remained—a professor of philosophy until " F r o m Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, edited by Lucien Price, copyright 1954, by Lucien Price, by permission of Little, Brown and C o m p a n y — A t l a n t i c Monthly Press. " P a u l Arthur Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (2d ed.; New Y o r k : Tudor Publishing Company, 1951), p. 3ff. ' Whitehead, Dialogues . . . , op.cit., p. 14.

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he retired as emeritus professor in 1937. It was there that most of his important philosophical works were written. He died on December 30, 1947, at the age of 83. in Modes of Thought he wrote: In Western Literature there are f o u r great thinkers, whose services to civilized thought rest largely upon their achievements in philosophic assemblage. . . . These men are Plato, Aristotle, Leibnitz, and William James. Plato grasped the i m p o r t a n c e of mathematical systems; but his chief f a m e rests u p o n the wealth of p r o f o u n d suggestions scattered t h r o u g h o u t his dialogues. . . . Aristotle systematized as he assembled. 5

Leibnitz, he implies, synthesized the great wealth of two thousand years of thought, and William James, whose mind was also adequately based upon the learning of the past, was particularly sensitive to the present. Whitehead, in a very real sense, combined in his own thinking the attributes of these four thinkers. His education and professional career at Cambridge was rooted in the past; in London he applied this knowledge to the demands of the present age; and at Harvard he reflected philosophically on what he had come to know and to understand. Although his essays dealing directly with problems of education comprise only a slender volume, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, he was continually concerned with them. Even his technical works, such as A Treatise on Universal Algebra0 or Process and Reality,7 contain passages that illustrate his interest in the ways in which ideas come alive and are utilized by the learner. Whitehead saw a unity among all things. "By 'organism,' Whitehead generally means a temporally bounded process which organizes a variety of given elements into a new fact." 8 Thus man cannot be ' A l f r e d North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: The Macmillan Company, copyright 1938), p. 3. "Alfred North Whitehead, A Treatise on Universal Algebra, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898). 7 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmology (New York: The Macmillan Company, copyright 1929, 1957 by Evelyn Whitehead). ' Victor Lowe, "The Development of Whitehead's Philosophy," in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 95, quoting a paper on 'Time," Sec. II, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference on Philosophy (Harvard University, 1926).

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considered apart from society and nature, and the education of man cannot be discussed apart from the multitude of influences which converge upon the learner at any given instant. It is in the light of this theory of "organism" that we shall discuss Whitehead's thoughts regarding education. AIMS OF EDUCATION

" M a n k i n d , " declares Whitehead, "never quite knows what he is after. When we survey the history of thought, and likewise the history of practice, we find that one idea after another is tried out, its limitations defined, and its core of truth elicited. . . . T h e proper test is not that of finality, but of progress." 9 T h e foregoing passage suggests the continuous interrelationship between thought and action. Thus thought attempts to clarify and systematize life activities, and at the same time the fruits of the intellect must become active in the affairs of men. Whitehead assumes that the world is basically one of ideas. " M y contention is, that this world is a world of ideas, and that its internal relations are relations between abstract concepts, and that the elucidation of the precise connection between this world and the feelings of actual experience is the fundamental question of scientific philosophy." 10 A n d again: " I n ture of life cannot "essentially culture divest labour from

the modern complex social organism, the advenbe disjoined from intellectual adventure," 1 1 but should be for action, and its cffect should be to the association of aimless toil." 1 2

With Plato, Whitehead maintained that society needs men of different function and abilities, but unlike Plato, perhaps, he believed " t h a t its educated masses are composed of members each with a tinge o f scholarship, a tinge of discovery, and a tinge of invention." 1 3 A n d finally he asserts the superiority of intellect above all other means by which man fashions and maintains his society when he ' Whitehead, Process . . . , op. cit., p. 21. 10

Whitehead, The Α ims . . . , op. cit., p. 109.

" Ibid., p. 98. 31 Ibid., p. 57. "Ibid., pp. 102-103.

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writes: "In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, [sic] the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed." 14 He writes, "Modern history begins when Europeans passed into a new phase of understanding which enabled them to introduce new selective agencies, unguessed by the older civilizations. It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is that factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature." 15 The adventure, the plasticity, the freedom of which Whitehead speaks is never unrestricted. He writes: "The claim for freedom in education carries with it the corollary that the development of the whole personality must be attended to"; 16 and again, "Freedom means that within each type the requisite coordination should be possible without the destruction of the general ends of the whole community." 17 With regard to the present world situation, with its rapid developments in the physical and the behavioral sciences, he reminds us of the breakup of the medieval unity at the beginning of our present age and concludes: "Any serious fundamental change in the intellectual outlook of human society must necessarily be followed by an educational revolution." 18 PURPOSES OF

EDUCATION

Whitehead views education in terms of utility. "Education is the guidance of the individual toward a comprehension of the art of life." 19 "Education is discipline for the adventure of life." 20 "Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge." 2 1 Whitehead advocates that formal schooling should be so organized from the elementary grades through the university that there is a " Ibid., p. 26. 15 A l f r e d N o r t h Whitehead, can Library, 1 9 5 5 ) , p. 85. " Whitehead, The Aims . . 17 Whitehead, Adventures . 13 Whitehead, The Aims . . " Ibid., p. 50. 20 Ibid., p. 102. 21 Ibid., p. 16.

Adventures

of Ideas

. , op. cit., p. 51. . . , op. cit., p. 75. . , op. cit., p. 83.

( N e w York: T h e N e w A m e r i -

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continuous progression f r o m the acquisition of facts through organized knowledge to wisdom. H e writes: W i t h o u t doubt, in its preliminary stages education is concerned with the introduction of order into the m i n d of the y o u n g child. Experience starts as a "blooming, buzzing c o n f u s i o n . " Order introduces enlargement, significance, importances, delicacies of perception. For long years, the major aspect of e d u c a t i o n is the reduction of c o n f u s i o n to order, and the provision of w e a p o n s for this p u r p o s e . 2 2

"Also education must pass beyond the passive reception of the ideas of others." 23 In another essay, he writes: . . . T h e child has to be taught the words that correspond to the things; the senior at college has lost the things that correspond to the words. His mind is o c c u p i e d by literary scenery; by doctrines derived f r o m books; by experiments of a selected character, with selected materials. . . . E v e n his g a m e s are organized. N o v e l impulse is f r o w n e d upon at the bridge table, o n the football field, and o n the river. N o m e m b e r of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing. 2 4

T o counterbalance the enormous amount of conformity imposed upon the individual by society, Whitehead pleads for the development of the imagination which he believes is caught rather than taught. This requires creative, imaginative teachers. "Imagination is a contagious disease. It cannot be measured by the yard, or weighed by the pound, and then delivered to the students by members of the faculty." 23 "In the modern complcx social organism, the adventure of life cannot be disjoined f r o m intellectual adventure." 2 Λ H e would join the active and the contemplative life with the realization and utilization of moral values which he maintains are derived f r o m "the habitual vision of greatness. . . . Now the sense of great" A. H. Johnson (ed.), Whitehead's American Essays in Social ( N e w York: Harper & Brothers, 1959). p. 167. 23 Whitehead. The Aims . . . , op. cit., p. 57. "'Johnson, Whitehead's American Essays . • . . op. cit., p. 168. 15 Whitehead, The Aims . . . . op. cit., p. 101. " Ibid., p. 98.

Philosophy

Whitehead's

Views on

Education

45

ness is an immediate intuition and not the conclusion of an argument." 27 I take it that he means that values are derived from the circumstances of the immediate situation when he writes, "But when ideals have sunk to the level of practice, the result is stagnation." 28 This sense of timeliness, of the immediate utilization of knowledge in terms of our present day is well summed up when he writes: "Education which is not modern shares the fate of all organic things which are kept too long." 29 Whitehead constantly warns against imparting knowledge to be stored for future use. "In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call 'inert ideas'—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations." 30 "Of course, education should be useful . . ." 81 "The really useful training yields a comprehension of a few general principles with a thorough grounding in the way they apply to a variety of concrete details." 32 "A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction." 33 . . . What I am anxious to impress on you is that though knowledge is one chief aim of intellectual education, there is another ingredient, vaguer but greater, and more dominating in its importance. The ancients called it "wisdom." You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge; but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom. Now wisdom is the way in which knowledge is held. . . "In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles." 35 27

Ibid., Ibid., * Ibid., "Ibid., Ibid., "Ibid., "Ibid., "Ibid., M Ibid., 28

p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p.

77. 40. 83. 13. 14. 38. 13. 41. 48.

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"Finally, there should grow the most austere of all mental qualities; I mean the sense for style. . . . Style is the ultimate morality of the mind. . . . Style is the fashioning of power, the restraining of power. . . . Now style is the exclusive privilege of the expert." 3 4

THE CURRICULUM OF EDUCATION

Regarding the curriculum, Whitehead remarks that "education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well." 37 "If we once abandon our fatal habit of cramming the children with theorems which they do not understand, and will never use, there will be plenty of time to concentrate their attention on really important topics." 3 8 "We enunciate two educational commandments, 'Do not teach too many subjects,' and again, 'What you teach, teach thoroughly.' " 39 T h e foregoing quotations summarize Whitehead's thoughts about the curriculum: whatever is taught should be immediately useful and thoroughly understood. He continues: " T h e problem of a curriculum is not so much the succession of subjects; for all the subjects should in essence be begun with the dawn of mentality. The truly important order is the order of quality which the educational procedure should assume." 40 Whitehead objects to memorizing generalizations before the learner has had many experiences upon which the generalization is based and insists upon the "radically untidy, ill-adjusted character of the fields of actual experience from which science starts." 41 There is n o royal road to learning through an airy path of brilliant generalisations. . . . There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is L i f e in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, w e offer children—Algebra, f r o m which nothing follows; Geometry, f r o m which nothing follows; Science, f r o m w h i c h nothing follows; History, f r o m w h i c h nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never " Ibid., p. " Ibid., p. M Ibid., p. x Ibid., p. "Ibid., p. 41 Ibid., p.

24. 58. 89. 14. 39. 109.

Whitehead's Views on Education

47

mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. . . , 4 2 " T h e solution which I am urging, is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our m o d e r n curriculum." 4 3 Whitehead describes education as a rhythmic d e v e l o p m e n t , b e ginning and ending in wonder. H e calls the three phases of the c y c l e romance, precision, and generalization. Education begins with a s e n s e of the reality and the immediacy of the situation and is rooted in p e r ception. In the s e c o n d phase, knowledge is systemized and p l a c e d in logical or chronological order, causal relations are described, and observation b e c o m e s m o r e selective and more precise. In the final phase, generalization, the student discovers the general principles which are derived f r o m his experience and applies t h e m to n e w situations to gain further mastery and understanding. W h i t e h e a d writes: "The stage of romance is the stage of first apprehension. T h e subject-matter has the vividness of novelty; it holds within itself u n explored c o n n e x i o n s with possibilities half-disclosed by glimpses, and half-concealed by the wealth of material." 4 4 "In this stage ( o f p r e c i s i o n ) , width of relationship is subordinated to exactness of formulation. It is the stage of grammar, the g r a m m a r of language and the grammar of science. It proceeds by forcing o n the students' acceptance of a given w a y of analyzing the facts, bit by bit. N e w facts are added, but they are the facts w h i c h fit into the analysis." 4 5 "The final stage of generalisation . . . is a return to r o m a n t i c i s m with added advantage of classified ideas and relevant technique. It is the fruition w h i c h has been the goal of the precise training. It is the final success." 4 6 Whitehead maintains that while the d e v e l o p m e n t of all the s c h o o l subjects such as language, arithmetic, and science occurs in the three "Ibid., p. 18-19.

"Ibid., p. 18. " Ibid., p. 29. * Ibid., p. 30.

"Ibid., pp. 30-31.

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stages mentioned, romance, precision, and generalization, the student will not be in the same stage in all subjects. For example, the learner must have acquired the precise use of language and have had some experiences with the formulation of generalized rules of grammar before he is able to undertake a systematic study of the sciences— that is, to proceed from the stage of romance to the stage of precision. Not recognizing this fact seems to me to result in one of our fatal errors in curriculum planning and in educational method. Whitehead describes the stages in this way: "Towards the age of fifteen the age of precision in language and of romance in science draws to its close, to be succeeded by a period of generalisation in language and precision in science." 47 Whitehead's education inclined him to favor the retention of the Latin and Greek classics, but he warned against an overemphasis on the past and on syntactical analysis. . . . Nor do I wish to be supposed to pronounce on the relative merits of a classical or modern curriculum. I would only remark that the understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent present. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. N o more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by depreciation of the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past and it is the future. 48

"You may take the noblest poetry in the world, and, if you stumble through it at a snail's pace, it collapses from a work of art into a rubbish heap. . . . I plead for an initial sense of the unity of the whole, to be given by a translation at the right pace." 48 ". . . Classics can only be defended on the ground that within that period, and sharing that period with other subjects, it can produce a necessary enrichment of intellectual character more quickly than any alternative discipline directed to the same object. . . . When the object has been obtained, the languages can be dropped." 50 About the virtues of liberal education over technical education, ,T

Ibid., "Ibid., " Ibid., "Ibid.,

p. p. p. p.

35. 14. 79. 71.

Whitehead's

Views on Education

49

and the separation of general education from specialization in the libera] arts college, he writes: "The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical: that is, no education which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision." 51 "You may not divide the seamless coat of learning. What education has to impart is an intimate sense for the power of ideas, for the beauty of ideas, and for the structure of ideas, together with a particular body of knowledge which has peculiar reference to the life of the being possessing it." 52 "I know that it seems contradictory to allow for specialism in a curriculum especially designed for a broad culture. . . . But I am certain that in education wherever you exclude specialism you destroy life." 63

METHODS IN

EDUCATION

In discussing methods in education, Whitehead finds difficulty in separating the "how" from the "what"—that is, the thing taught from the way in which it is taught. This view of the reciprocal relationship of the curriculum to method is consonant with his philosophy of organism. He also insists on the interrelationship of subjects. In Process and Reality, for example, he writes: "The systematization of knowledge cannot be conducted in watertight compartments." 54 For Whitehead, the activity and the personality of the teacher in directing learning is central. "The teacher has a double function. It is for him to elicit the enthusiasm by resonance from his own personality, and to create the environment of a larger knowledge and a firmer purpose. He is there to avoid the waste." 65 He advocates methods which involve the interrelationship of subjects: "It is essential that the generality of the method be continually M

Ibid., p. 58. "M Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 22. " W h i t e h e a d , Process . . . , op. cit., p. 15. 05 W h i t e h e a d , The Aims . . . . op. cit., p. 51.

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brought to light and contrasted with the specialty of the particular application." 5 8 "First-hand knowledge is the ultimate basis of intellectual life," 5 7 and "in education, we proceed from the particular to the general." 5 8 " T h e essential course of reasoning is to generalise what is particular, and then to particularise what is general. Without generality there is no reasoning, and without concreteness there is no importance." 5 9 In other words, the mere assemblage of data is only a first step. These data must be studied, organized, compared, abstracted, and generalized before they can be considered to be universal principles; but these principles are of no particular significance or value unless they are applied to specific concrete situations. T o learn rules in mathematics in the abstract is meaningless; to understand principles and rules without applying them to immediate specific situations is useless. Interest is central to Whitehead's discussion of methods in education. " F r o m the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery." 6 0 " F o r successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must either be new in itself or it must be invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times." 6 1 "Everything set before the young must be rooted in the particular and the individual." 6 2 " T h e devil to be avoided is the cramming of general statements which have no reference to individual personal experiences." 6 3 " Y o u r learning is useless to you till you have lost your text-books, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination," 6 4 and "education is not a process of packing articles in a trunk. . . . Its nearest analogue is the assimilation of food by a living organism: and we all know how Ibid., "Ibid., 1,8 Ibid., "Ibid., " Ibid., ° Ibid., β Ibid., "Ibid., "Ibid., M

p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p.

62. 61. 86. 63. 14. 102. 80. 71. IS.

Whitehead's

Views on

Education

51

necessary to health is palatable food under suitable conditions." 6 5 "Unless the pupils are continually sustained by the evocation of interest, the acquirement of technique, and the excitement of success, they can never make progress, and will certainly lose heart." β β "There can be no mental development without interest. . . . Now the natural mode by which living organisms are excited toward suitable self-development is enjoyment." 67 "The pupils have got to be made to feel that they are studying something, and are not merely executing intellectual minuets." 6 8 Whitehead maintains that intellectual discipline is essential to the life of an educated man and is, therefore, an important element in education. "The two principles, freedom and discipline, are not antagonists, but should be so adjusted in the child's life that they correspond to a natural sway, to and fro, of the developing personality." ββ "In no part of education can you do without discipline or can you do without freedom; but in the stage of romance the emphasis must always be on freedom to allow the child to see for itself and to act for itself. My point is that a block in the assimilation of ideas inevitably arises when a discipline of precision is imposed before a stage of romance has run its course in the growing mind." 7 0 "The real point is to discover in practice the exact balance between freedom and discipline which will give the greatest rate of progress over the things to be known." 71 " I hold that the only discipline, important for its own sake, is self-discipline, and that this can only be acquired by a wide use of freedom." 7 2 "In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place." 7 3 About the difference in methods in the teaching of language and science, Whitehead writes: "The educational method of the literary " Ibid., M Ibid., " Ibid., "Ibid., "Ibid., 70 Ibid., 71 Ibid., 71 Ibid. "Ibid.,

p. p. p. p. p. p. p.

44. 49. 42. 21. 41. 44. 46.

p. 16.

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PURPOSE

curriculum is the study of language, that is, the study of our most habitual method of conveying to others our states of mind." 74 "A scientific education is primarily a training in the art of observing natural phenomena, and in the knowledge and deduction of laws concerning the sequence of such phenomena." 75 ". . . All training in science should begin as well as end in research, and in getting hold of the subject-matter as it occurs in nature." 76 Next to Whitehead's insistence upon attention to the immediate interest of the learner, I am inclined to believe that Whitehead regards pace as of greatest importance: . . . The pupil's progress is often conceived as a uniform steady advance undifferentiated by change of type or alteration in pace; . . . I hold that this conception of education is based upon a false psychology of the process of mental development. . . . Life is essentially periodic. . . . [There] are the gross obvious periods which no one can overlook. There are also subtler periods of mental growth, with their cyclic recurrences yet always different as we pass from cycle to cycle, though the subordinate stages are reproduced in each cycle. That is why I have chosen the term "rhythmic," as meaning essentially the conveyance of difference within a framework of repetition. 77

Any consideration of the psychological "laws of learning" or of learning curves with their spurts, plateaus, and recessions will support Whitehead's point. "By the Rhythm of Education I denote a certain principle. . . . The principle is merely this—that different subjects and modes of study should be undertaken by pupils at fitting times when they have reached the proper stage of mental development." 78 ". . . Overhaste to impart mere knowledge defeats itself. The human mind rejects knowledge imparted in this way." 79 "There is, indeed, always the temptation to teach pupils a little more of fact and of precise theory than at that stage they are fitted Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 59. ''Ibid., p. 35. 71 Ibid., pp. 28-29. ™ Ibid., p. 27. "Ibid.. p. 43.

71

Whitehead's

Views on Education

53

to assimilate. . . . The phenomena of growth cannot be hurried beyond certain very narrow limits. . . . Yet, when all has been said in the way of caution, there is such a thing as pushing on, of getting to know the fundamental details and the main exact generalisations, and of acquiring an easy mastery of technique." 80 A certain ruthless definiteness is essential in education. I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorising a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance. The secret of success is pace, and the secret of pace is concentration. But in respect to precise knowledge, the watchword is pace, pace, pace. Get your knowledge quickly, and then use it. If you can use it, you will retain it. 81

"In my own work at universities," he writes, "I have been much struck by the paralysis of thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and unutilised. It should be the chief aim of a university professor to exhibit himself in his own true character—that is, as an ignorant man thinking, actively utilising this small share of knowledge." 82 SUMMARY

And now we have come back full circle to where we started: the world as a world of ideas, and the school as a place for making these ideas meaningful and for inspiring the learner to utilize these generalizations in concrete instances. Both teacher and student are learners —of course at different stages and of different things. There is much to know and so little time to acquire it that one must beware of inert, unutilized ideas. Discovering new ideas and applying them to concrete situations is the business of the school, where the teacher invites the pupil to join him in "The Adventure of Ideas." Ibid., " Ibid., 83 Ibid.,

p. 45. p. 47. p. 48.

III Innovations in

Education

Programed Instruction for

Nursing

M A R I E M. SEEDOR * every teacher has at some time been baffled because certain students just were not getting a point that seemed utterly obvious to the teacher. While certain processes and concepts were being explained some students watched and listened; some seemed to be copying every little word; some were obviously "doodling"; and some appeared merely to sit. Of course, teachers know that students should be continuously active; they should learn one little step at a time; they should have immediate knowledge of results; and each student should proceed at his own rate. How can the human teacher meet these goals? PROBABLY

It seemed to me that there might be an answer in the teaching machine. After all, the machine is designed for the individual student rather than for mass instruction—one machine for one student. The machine is a device for presenting to the student a program of material to be learned. Why not prepare the subject-matter program for use in the machine? Would not this be the same as if I were having a private tutorial session with each of my forty or so students in any one class? My adviser and I discussed this possibility for a doctoral study. He was very encouraging, and I decided to give it a try. Consequently the program has been written and is now ready to be tested in the classroom. The activities leading to this result are described in the sections that follow.

THE PLAN OF THE STUDY

The study is designed to run for the normal time assigned to the unit on "Asepsis" in the conventionally taught basic course in a nursing curriculum. The purpose of the study is to compare the * Instructor, Teachers College, Columbia University. 57

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learning of students who have used the AutoTutors (a teaching m a chine with a programed course) with that of students who have not used the programed material. The three participating schools are the Bronx Community College (called "School A " ) , the Dutchess Community College ("School B " ) , and the University of Rochester ("School C " ) . In School A , there will be two groups in the study: Group X , the experimental group, who will use the programed instruction with fifty minutes per student on the machine, and group Y, the control group, w h o will receive classroom instruction by the conventional method. T h e two groups are matched by high school averages. In School B, there will be only one group, with all students using the programed materials for fifty minutes per student on the machine, and in School C, there will also be only one group, with all students using the machine but with no set time allowed so that each student can work as long as she wishes. Thus students in the experimental group of School A and all students in the participating groups of Schools Β and C will use AutoTutors for the part of the unit normally taught by demonstration and discussion or lecture methods and will do the normal laboratory work in the conventional manner. All students in the participating groups in all three schools ( A , B, and C ) , will be given a pretest and an end-of-instruction test four to six weeks later to measure the retention of learning. After the program has been used in the classroom the student responses will be analyzed and appropriate changes made in the program. (This detailed revision on the basis of a study of student behavior is a major factor in the concept of programed instruction and is the reason that, at the present time, programing a course of instruction is such a specialized and expensive process.)

THE

PROGRAMING

OF

THE

MATERIAL

The actual programing of the material began about a year ago. I first wrote to a number of nursing schools in order to have them share with me their outlines and examinations for the course "Fundamentals in Nursing," with particular emphasis on the unit "Asepsis." A thorough study of the commonly used textbooks in "Funda-

Programed

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for Nursing

59

mentals of Nursing" courses was also made to determine the content or material to be programed. A detailed outline of content was then prepared. An important step was to define exactly what achievement the student was to show at the end of the program of instruction. Once this terminal behavior was made clear, it was necessary to select the technical terms, facts, laws, examples, and illustrations that would best help the student achieve this goal. Obviously the programer assumes a great deal of responsibility: ( 1 ) he must present the factual materials to be learned in small steps so that almost any learner can understand; ( 2 ) he must take care to present only the important facets of any body of knowledge and weed out those portions which are not pertinent; and ( 3 ) he must anticipate every kind of response, right or wrong, which might be made, then analyze the reasons for each kind of error and provide a series of questions that help overcome the misconception shown by the student's response. When the "branching" questions have been answered by the student, he is then directed back to the place where he would have been had he answered the original question correctly. THE

TRYOUT OF THE

PROGRAM

As the program developed it was necessary to try out each section with students who were typical of the type found in a nursing school. These tryouts were given to high school students who anticipated entering a nursing program. The preliminary "frames" (a "frame" is the part or section exposed on the screen at one time if a film is used, or the unit of information and the question which appears on one page) were then revised as a result of student responses. Changes, such as defining a word, clarifying a principle, or perhaps even rewriting a paragraph, were made. After thorough editing and revising, the program was then put on microfilm.

60

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A SAMPLE

FROM

THE

AND

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PROGRAM ON

NATIONAL

PURPOSE

"ASEPSIS"

INTRODUCTION TO ASEPSIS A

TUTORFILM*

T h e pages that follow are part of an intrinsic program. They are the first few frames of a TutorFilm* entitled Introduction to Asepsis, a basic course in Asepsis written by Miss Marie M. Seedor, R.N., assisted by the editorial staff of USI Educational Science Division. In an intrinsic program, the information presented to a student is broken down into a series of small steps. Most steps are followed by a multiple choice question; the student's response to this question determines what information is presented next. If the answer is incorrect the student is told why it is incorrect and then given further instruction that will enable her to select an accurate answer. If the answer is correct, it is confirmed, another step of information is presented, and the cycle begins again. This material was written for use in the AutoTutor Mark II teaching machine, and its pages are not read consecutively. When this program is presented by the AutoTutor, the pages are automatically presented in the correct sequence. For the convenience of readers of this pamphlet, added instructions are given at the foot of each page.

F 1 LESSON

I

INTRODUCTION TO ASEPSIS

An important way in which you, as a nurse, can help protect yourself and others f r o m infection and disease is by learning and practicing the principles of asepsis. In both homes and hospitals, you will be responsible for carrying out the aseptic procedures that fight disease-producing bacteria. This AutoTutor program will help you to learn how to provide safe surroundings for your patients, yourself, and all who come into the environment.

Programed

Instruction

for

61

Nursing

To understand the range of asepsis, you must study the body's reaction to infection, how bacteria are transmitted, and the physiology of wound healing. The basic rules for aseptic techniques are drawn from principles of microbiology, physics, and chemistry. The manual skills needed to carry out asepsis can be mastered quickly through practice. However, if your practice of asepsis is to be both technically correct and intelligent, you must understand the reasons which lie behind the techniques. For example, you will need to know why equipment and instruments must be kept sterile, or made "clean." Please continue by pressing Button A. (NOTE: The reader should turn to page F 2.) F 2 First of all, let's inquire into the meaning of asepsis. As you know, bacteria are present everywhere—at all times. Some are harmful, others are not. Harmful bacteria are called pathogenic (disease producing). Some pathogenic bacteria multiply and produce a poison in the body. The condition that results is called sepsis, literally "poisoning." In these cases, the patient commonly complains of fatigue and has an elevated temperature, i.e., a temperature higher than you would observe in a "well" patient. In septic conditions, an elevated temperature is called a septic temperature. Generally speaking, the word septic [is] applied to any condition in which pathogenic bacteria are present and freely multiplying. For example, a septic sore throat is a severe sore throat caused by certain streptococci (a particular type of bacteria). To curb the spread of disease and infection, we must control pathogenic bacteria. Here is a question on the material you have just read. Select the correct answer and push the button with the letter corresponding to the answer. Are septic conditions desirable in a hospital environment? Yes. No.

Β A

(NOTE: Response A corresponds to page F 3. Response Β corresponds to page F 5.)

EDUCATION

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PURPOSE

F 3 Y O U R A N S W E R : No. Septic conditions are not desirable in a hospital environment. You are correct. Certainly, septic, or germ laden, conditions are highly undesirable in a hospital. We must combat and control bacteria to prevent the spread of disease in hospitals and elsewhere. By adding the negative prefix, "a", to the word septic, we get the word aseptic. Aseptic means just the opposite of septic. It means germ-free, or strictly speaking, freedom f r o m pathogenic bacteria. In the hospital we strive for aseptic conditions. Unfortunately, a completely germ free environment is difficult to achieve and almost impossible to maintain for any length of time. Therefore aseptic procedures must be observed continuously and rigorously by all hospital personnel if disease and infection are to be effectively controlled. Aseptic procedures are, in general, any precautions, practices, and safeguards that tend to bring about an aseptic condition. Are aseptic procedures normally observed outside the hospital? Yes. No.

Β A

( N O T E : Response A corresponds to page F 4. Response Β corresponds to page F 6.) F 4 Y O U R A N S W E R : Aseptic procedures are not normally observed outside the hospital. Sorry, you're wrong. "Aseptic procedures" may sound hospitallike, but they are actually any procedures anywhere that control growth and spread of pathogenic bacteria. Probably the simplest example of an aseptic procedure in everyday life is handwashing. When you wash your hands thoroughly, with soap and water, you remove not only visible dirt and grime, but many disease-carrying bacteria. This is why you wash your hands even when they don't "look" dirty. As you will find out, handwashing is a very important aseptic procedure in the hospital, too. You will learn how to wash your hands properly, and in different ways, to suit different conditions.

Programed

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63

RETURN and choose the other answer. (NOTE: The reader should return to page F 3.) F 5 YOUR ANSWER: Yes, septic conditions are desirable in a hospital environment. Your answer is wrong. Did you read the question carefully? We pointed out that disease and infection are caused and transmitted by pathogenic bacteria. Septic conditions are those in which such bacteria are allowed to grow and multiply freely. Does it not follow, then, that septic conditions must be wholly undesirable in a hospital? In a hospital, we are trying to fight disease. The conditions we want are just the opposite of septic. Now, RETURN and choose the correct answer. (NOTE: The reader should return to page F 2.) F 6 YOUR ANSWER: Yes, aseptic procedures are normally observed outside the hospital. You are correct. You have observed aseptic procedures all your life, in all sorts of ways. You wash your hands, wear clean clothing, and protect your food against contamination. You can probably think of many other ways in which you guard against bacteria. Of all the dangers in the environment, none is more prevalent or more serious than pathogenic bacteria or microorganisms, as they are also called. All hospital personnel are responsible for protecting themselves and others from pathogenic bacteria. You, as a nurse, must protect the patient from harmful organisms that you may be harboring; you must also protect him from the pathogenic bacteria of his fellow patients. The techniques to provide this protection can be very simple. They simpler they are, the easier they are to follow. Now try this question: Does the practice of covering garbage cans (a Public Health Regulation) promote aseptic conditions? Yes.

C

No.

Β

I don't know. A

64

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PURPOSE

As you see, the student is led progressively, by a carefully arranged sequence of steps from very simple material to more complex material. He is given material to be learned in small logical units, usually a paragraph or less in length, and is tested immediately on each bit of information. The result is then used automatically to control the material that the student sees next. If the student passes the test question, he is automatically given the next bit of information and the next question. If the student fails the test question, the preceding bit of information is reviewed, the nature of his error is explained to him, and he is given additional instruction on the same point. He is never given the correct answer, but is told to return to the main stream of the program and to try again. In this method, the primary purpose of testing is not to furnish the student with "knowledge of results." The primary purpose is to determine whether the communication was successful, in order that corrective steps may be taken if the communication process has failed.

THE METHODS OF

PROGRAMING

There is an important distinction between the two methods of programing, one called "linear" and the other "intrinsic." With the linear method, there is no variation in the sequence in which information and questions are presented. Every learner goes through every step, and the steps are small enough that there is almost continual success. This is what is popularly known as the "write-in" or constructed response method. The student fills in his response, then compares his answer. If the student's response is correct, he moves along in the program; however, if his response is wrong, there is no correction; he sees what the response should have been and moves along in the same program. Unlike the linear, or straight-line program, the second method, intrinsic programing or "branching," is responsive to individual differences. Intrinsic programing simply refers to the fact that the necessary alternative routes are built into the program. T h e test questions are the multiple-choice type, and a separate set of correctional materials for each wrong answer is included in the multiple-choice

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alternative. T h e student is a selective agent and is given the opportunity to increase his power of discrimination and selection. He must make a choice from four or five alternatives, thus providing an opportunity to exercise his reason and to make some kind of judgment. As you might guess, the most difficult step in programing the material is the actual writing of the frames. The program should never intentionally mislead the student so that he is more likely to respond with a wrong answer than with the right one. On the other hand, it would be rather easy to make sure that no student ever selected a wrong answer simply by overprompting in the question. Nor should the question be answered very easily by rereading the information on the frame, for this would then lack challenge and be boring for most or all students. QUESTIONS TO B E

ANSWERED

As with any new idea, there are still questions to be answered. Among these are: How will the program be used? What part of the program may be done in class? What part may be done as library work? How may the knowledge gained through the program be used in the classroom and in the clinical area to improve nursing? How may the instructor derive greatest benefit from the use of programed instruction? How shall practice be incorporated into the program? These are questions for which there are no ready answers. The instructors participating in the study are being encouraged to contribute to the research and to help evaluate the teaching-machine program. They are keeping a daily log and will later respond to a questionnaire. They are encouraged to use the program any way they want, for the program is not designed to control the instructor; the instructor controls the program. As we are well aware, the product of an instructor who is creative is the variety of opportunities she has planned for individuals and groups to experience and to learn. W e are now in the process of testing an auto-instructional device— a new tool for the instructor. Will the instructor use these gifts of modern technology in structuring learning opportunities? We must wait and see!

Contiguous

Grouping

W. JAMES DRENNEN * IT WAS our desire to meet the needs of individual pupils better and the desire of our teachers to do a better teaching job than they were doing already that prompted us to try some form of grouping for instruction. Teachers felt the frustration of attempting to meet the needs of the gifted, average, and underachievers in the same class. Furthermore, they observed the impatience of the fast-moving child and the frustrating, competitive effort of the slower-moving child with him—both disturbing and painful experiences. Narrowing the range of achievement levels seemed to us to be the trial basis for grouping, rather than grouping in subject areas such as reading, or forming special sections for the gifted. So developed the scheme we devised five years ago which, for want of a better name, we call "contiguous grouping." Webster defines "contiguous" as "adjoining, touching or near to." We may say that the achievement levels of individuals in one group are near in succession to, or there is contiguous association with, those of the next group. There is not homogeneity. CRITERIA

FOR

GROUPING

In general, contiguous grouping is based upon the general achievement, the work habits, and the study skills of pupils, as well as their achievement in subject areas, especially reading and arithmetic. We keep our kindergarten, first, and second grades in heterogeneous groups. At the end of the year, we carefully consider each child entering third grade in the light of the criteria mentioned above, supplemented by teachers' judgment, careful study of the pupils' cumulative records, class performance, test results, and any other * Principal, P e n n Valley School, L o w e r 66

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pertinent factors; intelligence quotients do not pigeonhole a child. In like manner, we group our fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. In a grade of three sections, the top group would likely contain a range, in terms of reading levels, from average or grade level to two or more years above grade level. The arithmetic performance might range from "B" or "C" to "A." The achievement and performance of the individuals in the middle group would overlap that of the pupils in the top group, with a range of reading abilities from one-half year below grade level to approximately one year above grade level, and arithmetic achievement indicated by marks from "C" or "D" to "B," and even "A." The performance of the low group will overlap that of the middle group, ranging in reading levels from one year or more below grade to average or grade level. Arithmetic achievement here might be indicated by marks of "D" or "E" to "B" or "C." We keep this section smaller in number, from sixteen to twenty, to enable the teacher to devote more time to individual problems than is possible in larger groups. It is interesting to note that the I.Q.'s range from 112 to 174 in a typical top section and from 98 to 133 in a low section. The overlapping of achievement levels is shown rather definitely by standard test scores. For example, the May, 1961, scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills show medians and ranges in grade equivalents as follows: Group 6A (low) 6C (average) 6B (high)

Median 7.6 8.3 10.0

Range 6.0- 8.7 7.3-10.1 8.6-10.7

At the end of the year the membership of each section is reviewed, and if performance warrants movement from one group to another changes are made. Last June ten children were changed to other sections. This is also done sometimes after the opening of school in the fall, if we find a child has been misplaced. The records of new entrants are carefully studied before placement is made.

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ADVANTAGES OF CONTIGUOUS GROUPING

We feel the advantages of this grouping far outweigh the disadvantages. Briefly stated, they are as follows: ( 1 ) Plenty of stimulation, challenge, and healthy competition results for every child without the boredom and frustration that can face children in more heterogeneous groups. Enrichment and activities, drill and opportunities for leadership and responsibility can be provided each group as they are able to accept and assimilate new learnings, with a greater feeling than before of accomplishment by all. ( 2 ) Because of a narrower range of achievement levels, teachers can do a better job of planning and teaching than otherwise, adjusting techniques, materials, and procedures to suit the group. Also, such grouping enables the teacher to meet the needs of individual children whether it be through enrichment and extension of activities in all areas, more individualized reading, or more time to improve study skills, diagnose difficulties, or do remedial teaching than under other plans. ( 3 ) Regardless of the form of grouping, there will still be, in any one class, many differences in the amount of pupil information, levels of skill development, interests, attitudes, and habits of work. However, contiguous grouping does enable a teacher to have less grouping within her class in reading, spelling, arithmetic, or any area than in a heterogeneous class, thus freeing her for more time with the group as a whole or with individuals. ( 4 ) Moreover, we believe by contiguous grouping our children will be better prepared than under heterogeneous grouping to meet the competition and group activities of the junior high school, where another type of grouping prevails. ( 5 ) Rotating the group levels among teachers is not without its advantages. Teachers agree that rotation is fair, but most teachers prefer working with the middle or top groups. The challenge is greater than with the low group. We try to avoid the jolt of going from one extreme to the other, but in any case each level requires a change of pace, a different approach, different techniques, motiva-

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tion, and goals. And so the teaching experience in the same grade for one teacher becomes a varied one. LIMITATIONS OF

THE

PLAN

No plan of grouping for instruction is perfect. Contiguous grouping is no exception. Those who voice objections to the plan also see the validity of its goals. The chief objections are: (1) It is believed by some that the children in the slower-moving group need more of the stimulation and challenge of the faster-moving and better students. At the same time, they see the danger in the tension and discouragement of too stiff competition. (2) In spite of the fact that we constantly guard against any action, label, or discriminatory procedure, some parents permit their pride to overrule their judgment and insist that the smaller, slower-moving group places a stigma on the child and injures him psychologically. Fortunately, these people are few. There is little evidence that a child thus feels inferior or recedes into lazier or more disorganized work habits or patterns than under other methods of grouping. There is little feeling of inferiority or superiority from any group, largely because we combine sections for music, physical education, assemblies, school journeys, intramural sports, school council, and many other activities. Grouping of any kind cannot solve all the problems of instruction or learning. It does facilitate to some extent the teacher's activities and helps her reach her goals more effectively than without such grouping. In the long run, it is the teacher's knowledge of children, her knowledge of methods, her own store of information, and her skill in applying this knowledge that are the major factors in guiding children's learning.

Team Teaching in the Elementary

and

Secondary Schools ROBERT H. ANDERSON * of school organization to be examined here did not even exist, except in incipient or primitive form, in America (or anywhere else) until forty-nine months ago. The phrase "team teaching" cannot be found in the Education Index prior to the 1957-59 volume, and there are only a few dozens of people in the United States who have ever taken a course in team teaching or team leadership. Yet I dare say that at this moment there are several thousands of American schools in which teachers and administrators will state that they are seriously studying, and perhaps a thousand schools engaging in, one or another form of team teaching. Even the most casual examination of state and national convention programs for 1961-62 suggests that team teaching will be among the most certain topics for discussion and debate. Almost every national magazine in education has already given the topic signal attention, and the research agencies of the ΝΕΑ, the U. S. Office of Education, and affiliated groups have in some cases been swamped with appeals for information and help. The pioneer school systems whose team teaching enterprises have been described in the burgeoning literature are, similarly, flooded with requests for information and for permission to visit. It may well be wondered whether any other arrangement has created so much excitement in so short a space of time. T H E FORM

My first obligation to you is to put team teaching into some sort of reasonable perspective. Most of the aforementioned excitement is, in my judgment, premature and unwarranted. Team teaching, in essence, is a major stage in an evolutionary process that has been going on for some time. Before turning to its history, however, I * Associate Professor of Education, Harvard University. 70

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will define team teaching and urge you to the realization that the fundamental ideas underlying team teaching are on the whole misunderstood or misapplied by the bandwagon jumpers who constitute perhaps the majority of the thousands to whom reference has already been made. To prevent misunderstanding as to my own role in the team-teaching movement and in this immediate situation, let me also state ( 1 ) that team teaching has no mysterious or magical powers, (2) that I strongly advise against its widespread adoption at this time, (3) that my purpose, rather, is to stimulate thoughtful, objective, and open-minded examination of the ideas and practices represented in the team-teaching mechanism. Having disclaimed an evangelistic purpose here, let me swing around to the admission that I have great faith in the ultimate potential usefulness of team teaching to the progress of American schools. Though I worry that this promising arrangement may fail of acceptance because of impatience, or the absence of theoretical understanding, or misapplication, or (at the other extreme) the stubborn and close-minded resistance of the Old Guard among us, I see reason for optimism about its survival. The research data and the fast-changing attitudes apparent within the profession seem to suggest that a solid movement may be underway.

DEFINITIONS

First, moving counterclockwise, let me tell you what team teaching is not. ( 1 ) It is not departmentalization. Though team teaching encourages the idea of complementary specializations existing within teams, team teaching is in no sense an imitation, a distortion, or a perversion of the conventional pattern of departmental organization. ( 2 ) It is not large-group instruction. Although it is true that most teams do a good deal of teaching in large groups (i.e., assemblages of up to 100, 150, 180 pupils), it is theoretically legitimate and possible to have scarcely any large-group lessons in team teaching. Certain projects, where the customary sequence calls for large-group teaching followed by small "sections" or subgroups for follow through, probably should not be labeled as "team teaching."

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( 3 ) It is not merit rating in disguise. Merit rating implies the payment of higher salaries to those teachers whose effectiveness and usefulness is judged to be (relatively) superior to other teachers of equivalent background who are performing in the same role. Team teaching is indeed an arrangement which attempts to pay higher salaries to the more effective and useful teachers, but it does so by assigning such persons to different (and presumably more difficult) roles. There are other things that team teaching is not, but these three cover the questions most frequently raised. Now then, what is it? Taking note of the great diversity of team-teaching projects and pointing out that there is danger in too many exclusive definitions, my colleague Shaplin has prepared this definition: "Team teaching is an effort to improve instruction by the reorganization of personnel in teaching. Two or more teachers are given responsibility, working together, for all, or a significant part of the instruction of the same group of students." 1 My own preference is for a definition which requires three or more teachers to be involved, on grounds that role differentiation, effective subdivision of functions, and the profitable exchange of ideas and criticism are necessarily limited when only two adults are involved. By the way, at this moment I see six or seven as the likeliest maximum number of team members, though experience may lead to a different view. T e a m members work together in all three teaching functions: planning, actual work with children, and evaluation. The obvious limitations of time, space, and other resources make it impossible for all these functions to be co-operative all the time, but the general idea is that ( 1 ) all team members (including children where possible) should participate in the formulation of broad over-all objectives for the total program; ( 2 ) all team members should participate at least weekly in the formulation of the more immediate objectives of the total program; ( 3 ) all team members should be given at least periodic opportunity to contribute to the specific daily planning of colleagues and vice versa; ( 4 ) all team members should at all times be at least 1

J u d s o n T. Shapiin, " T e a m Teaching," Saturday 1961), 54.

Rerien·,

XI-IV

(May

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minimally conversant with the specific daily plans of the other team members; ( 5 ) all team members should at least occasionally (i.e., several times weekly) carry on teaching functions in the presence of colleagues whose own roles might alternately be to assist, to observe pupil reaction, or some other factor, and to offer constructive criticism in subsequent discussion; ( 6 ) all team members should participate in periodic (weekly?) evaluation of the total program and in as much specific evaluative discussion as time and energy allow. (See 5, above.) It becomes obvious that such a pattern of operations would require a quality and quantity of professional conversation to stagger the imagination! Each team's success in arranging for such extensive communication will obviously be limited. The quality of leadership, the over-all efficiency of the team's members, and the quality of the school curriculum itself can have great bearing on a team's ability to maintain good communication at a reasonable expenditure of energy. This raises several additional questions about teams. Is leadership necessary? If so, need it be formalized? Do teachers find hierarchical organization objectionable? Cannot the leader function be rotated? On these matters we have only scant experience, and several different theories have been offered. My own view, which has if anything been intensified and confirmed in our experience to date, is that leadership is indeed necessary; it does need to be formalized; teachers do live comfortably within a hierarchy (if the leader is at least minimally qualified for the role); and rotation of leaders is appropriate only in situations where persons are "in training," or its equivalent.

ADVANTAGES AND LIMITATIONS

One presumed advantage of team teaching is that it allows the more competent, the more committed, and the more influential teachers to play a more significant role in the life of the school. Until team teaching came along this kind of person tended to remain in his own classroom, with relatively little direct effect upon the decisions and professional performance of colleagues. Also, such teachers would work directly with only thirty-or-so children each year. The road to

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"advancement" was to the principal's office, where of course there was no longer the same opportunity to practice the aforementioned teaching skills. Team teaching now offers to the "born teacher" an intermediate leadership role which is still a teaching role. Further, the team leader works, ultimately, with many times the usual number of children. His skills and insights become directly available to colleagues. He is, at once, a teacher, an influencer of teachers, and a master craftsman in the eyes of his colleagues and the community. Yes, this is the idea at its best. It does not always work out this happily. If the basis of his reputation as a "born teacher" proves upon inspection to be shallow or superficial, there is of course trouble ahead. If over time he does not keep his substantive knowledge upto-date, with commensurate retooling of his technical-professional skills, again there can be embarrassment. If, as appears rather often to be the case, he does not have those intuitions and attitudes that allow some persons to feel comfortable in a role of leadership and responsibility, again there is potential unhappiness. Despite heroic efforts over many decades to provide teachers with supervision and in-service growth opportunities, the typical teacher is insufficiently well-informed in content areas and insufficiently proficient in technical-professional performance. Under the false label of academic freedom, individuality—call it what you will—we tolerate all sorts of idiosyncrasy and unsuitable or indefensible teaching behavior. By encasing each teacher in a private classroom not generally visible to his peers and vice versa, we allow such idiosyncrasy to flourish and crystallize until remedy or modification becomes almost impossible. Team teaching, if it has one supreme virtue, causes teachers to look at themselves and one another and provides the opportunity for seeing alternatives, recognizing correctable faults, and in various ways developing over time a technology that may be confidently defended. I would in no sense argue that the result can or should be a uniform or standard approach to teaching. Though I strongly believe that "best" ways do exist or can be found for many situations (hence, teaching becomes in large part a "science"), I am equally convinced that many alternatives are possible in most situations and that there

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will always be room for individuality and artistry within each teacher's classroom. But the artist must possess a defensible art! Team composition, in fact, should take differences into account and capitalize upon them. The most productive teams, I have found, are those peopled by individuals somewhat unlike each other in a professional personality. These people are more likely to engage in healthy argument and create a stimulating salt-and-pepper atmosphere than are teams of look-alikes. There remains at least one aspect of team organization which must be explained. Some teams make extensive use of nonprofessional assistants, while others do not. Which of these is bona fide team teaching? The answer is, both. Actually it is largely coincidental that the pilot projects have tended to use noncertified personnel extensively: the original intent in at least some cases was to free the teachers from routine tasks in order that they might have additional time available for curriculum revision and other research-and-development activities. However, it soon became apparent that nonprofessional assistants are invaluable and that teaching teams can make more efficient use of such helpers than can teachers in conventionally organized schools. Though nonprofessional workers are not inevitably assigned to teams, it is clear that: ( 1 ) perhaps 25-30 per cent of what typical classroom teachers do, can and should be delegated to less expensive nonprofessionals; ( 2 ) until teachers are at last relieved of direct and continuous involvement in such duties there can be no real dignity or prestige to the teaching role. Next, a few words about grouping and class sizes. In teams, it is possible to arrange groups of many different sizes at will, the only limitations being the number of available instructors and the physical spaces available. Thus far, most pilot teams have tended to use the conventional 25-30 as the modal group size, probably due to habit and the familiar architectural setting. Large groups are probably used too often in some projects (the defense is that some teachers are thus released for necessary planning), and in most cases there is as yet too little development of arrangements for small-group instruction. However, there seems now to be a growing awareness of the advantages and disadvantages, for each specific content or purpose,

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of the various-sized groupings, and it seems probable that useful guidelines will slowly emerge. Even more important, teaching techniques specifically appropriate for large-group instruction and smallgroup instruction will gradually develop. Experience to date suggests that, upon first going into team teaching, most teachers will use essentially the same teaching procedures whenever they confront children, regardless of their number. Lest this point be misunderstood, it seems to mean that despite a century of practice with groups of thirty or less, teachers have not developed enough different strategies or techniques for dealing with small-group opportunities. Perhaps by now you will appreciate some of the reasons f o r my caution against willy-nilly enthusiasm for team teaching. The definition emphasizes that an enormous amount of staff planning and intrateam communication is necessary. Membership in teams makes very different intellectual and emotional demands upon teachers, and it calls for the acquisition of new skills and attitudes. Hasty venturing into so complicated an arrangement could well prove disastrous for a sizeable number of the present teaching force. Many of these more fragile or vulnerable persons ought not to be teaching even in conventional classrooms. Editorial comment on the presumed advantages and strengths of team teachings has also crept into my remarks thus far. T e a m teaching offers hope of greater flexibility in utilizing instructional resources including personnel and in responding to the whole range of each child's educational needs. It offers to teachers a remarkable opportunity for professional growth through the constant exchange of professional information and criticism. A n d it serves as an almost certain stimulant to fundamental curriculum reconstruction, which in the long run may be its most practical advantage.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Now that you have a broad definition in mind and have been alerted to one man's view of its promise and its dangers, let us stop for a moment to inquire further, "How on earth did team teaching come about?" Perhaps you will agree that the answer is a fascinating and reassuring one.

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It is difficult to decide where to begin the historical narrative. The first known effort to train teachers for the "new" plan of team teaching took place at Harvard in the summer of 1957, and the first fullscale project in team teaching was launched in an elementary school in Lexington, Massachusetts, by those teachers in the 1957-58 school year. At approximately the same time, numbers of related projects were launched by several other universities and in certain secondary schools associated with the NASSP's Commission on the Experimental Study of the Utilization of the Staff in the Secondary School. Every profession can point to certain significant events, or series of events, which stand out over the long course of the profession's development. T o cite only a few such instances in our own history, we might point to the appearance of the Quincy Grammar School in 1848, or the halfcentury dominated after 1836 by the McGuffey Readers, or the opening in 1873 (in St. Louis) of the first permanent public kindergarten, or the early work of John Dewey in the University of Chicago Laboratory School. At this moment it is my prediction that the decade which began in 1955, and through which we are still churning, may ultimately come to be regarded as one of the major turning points in American public education. That we may reach this verdict is by no means due solely to the emergence of team teaching, however. The year of 1955 seems to have been a year when a number of conventional arguments and practices were discovered to have lost their validity, when certain long-building forces for change seemed all at once to combine their strength, and when certain unusual or unfamiliar arrangements seemed rather suddenly to come to mind. Allowing for the fact that historical threads run through each of them so that the identification of specific dates is essentially improper, we may nevertheless point to several major developments which either began or "took hold" about 1955: (1) The nongraded elementary school, after a dozen or so years of trial development, emerged as a definite alternative to conventional graded structure, and national magazines and conferences reflected a lively interest in the movement. ( 2 ) Educational television emerged from the crude experimental stage, accompanied by a surge of interest in other audiovisual aids to instruction. (3) Pioneer efforts to make use of nonprofessional assistants to teachers, as in Bay City, Michigan, and in

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the Yale-Fairfield Study, became almost overnight a cause celebre and touched off (sometimes violent) discussion of what is and what is not teaching. At the same time, energetic discussion of merit rating was enlivening the literature and pumping smoke into meeting rooms. ( 4 ) The teaching machine and programed instruction, as exemplified in the work of Skinner and his colleagues, appeared as a dramatic alternative to conventional procedures of program organization, instruction, and evaluation. (5) Criticisms of public education by various writers and scholars outside the public-school establishment, as well as attacks by Rudolf Flesch and others, reached a kind of crescendo and led, sometimes profitably and sometimes not, to local and national re-examination of the school enterprise. ( 6 ) More important, university professors and scholarly societies in the various disciplines, especially the sciences and mathematics, began at this time to engage in fundamental curriculum revision. Such projects as the School Mathematics Study Group, the University of Illinois mathematics and arithmetic projects, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, and the Physical Science Study Committee were either underway or about to be, with the result that public-school teachers would shortly have not only new resources at their disposal but new needs and opportunities for personal study and training. ( 7 ) "Gifted" children became the object of special concern and attention, and this along with other forces led to a sharp increase in the literature on a longfamiliar problem, pupil-grouping practices. (8) New approaches to teacher education, such as the internship plan launched by Harvard in the summer of 1955, brought the school systems and the college staffs into a more intimate working relationship. The Harvard-Newton Summer Program, which called for four or five apprentices to work simultaneously with a gifted master teachcr. revealed both the capacity of children for multiple relationships with adults and the advantages of co-operative and collaborative teaching arrangements. Prior to 1955, when the foregoing developments were stirring up the national scene, there had been many decades of slow but steady erosion of certain conventions in curriculum and staff organization. There were, of course, certain dramatic episodes and "giant steps" along the way, each being primarily an effort to arrange more appropriate and individualized instruction, or to utilize personnel and

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instructional resources more effectively, or to translate more recent knowledge about child development into operational terms. Let none of us underestimate the relevance and importance of the Batavia Plan, the Lancastrian Plan, the Dalton Laboratory Plan, the Winnetka Plan, Wirt's work-study-play Platoon School, Hosic's Co-operative Group Plan, or the earliest nongraded programs launched by Preston W. Search, Leonard Wheat, and Lowell Goodrich, to mention only a few. Any serious effort to trace the history of team teaching and related organization plans (especially nongrading, which is by all odds the most important of the arrangements now being developed), would inevitably uncover hundreds if not thousands of little-known advances, in Europe as well as America, in the direction of truly individualized instruction. The historian would probably be startled to discover a remarkable little book by Search, published in 1901, 2 and daring to propose an ideal school which astonishingly resembles certain "new ideas" on the 1961 horizon. Apropos of our current interest in team teaching, for example, Search proposes to free teachers from routine functions, to join teachers in a federation for planning purposes, to build teacher-training functions into the very fabric of the school itself, to pay adequate salaries which "should be discriminative" [stc], to afford opportunity to observe in the best schools, "or better still, by association in the same school with co-workers who represent, in their selection, the best personnel and the best methods," 8 among other recommendations. The historian might also note that various efforts at informal cooperation or collaboration among teachers have been made at an increasing rate for the past quartercentury or more. Teachers for many years have been exchanging function, combining classes, pooling their classes prior to temporary regrouping for (e.g.) reading instruction, and subdividing the total workload. Informal hierarchical organization, even though voluntary, has existed in many schools. Especially in larger high schools and in those with core programs, teachers in the same department or division have functioned much like teams. At the college level, even the phrase "team teaching" was ' P r e s t o n W. Search, An Ideal School: or, Looking Forward D. Appleton & Co., 1901). International Education Series. 'Ibid., p. 305.

(New York:

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u s e d as early as 1941 to describe the efforts of the teachers to w o r k together. 4 T h e very existence of these a r r a n g e m e n t s would tend to s u p p o r t the a r g u m e n t that t e a m teaching was an inevitable developm e n t o n the A m e r i c a n scene, p r o b a b l y not as an ultimate f o r m but as o n e of the m a j o r events in the centuries-old search for an a d e q u a t e system of school organization. B e f o r e concluding this historical review I would reiterate that the n o n g r a d i n g of schools 5 is by f a r t h e most f u n d a m e n t a l and i m p o r t a n t of t h e c u r r e n t trends in school reorganization. A n d in this connection I w o u l d point out that multiage groupings a p p e a r to have notable a d v a n t a g e s f o r children both socially a n d academically. β N o n g r a d e d s e c o n d a r y schools are already o n t h e scene (e.g. in M e l b o u r n e , F l o r i d a ) , and m a n y of the pilot team-teaching projects have built n o n g r a d e d n e s s into t h e m , f o r e x a m p l e , by including pupils of t w o or m o r e age levels in the teams.

RESEARCH FINDINGS

R e s e a r c h in t e a m teaching is a f r u s t r a t i n g activity, since a p p r o p r i a t e r e s e a r c h m o d e l s a n d i n s t r u m e n t s are not available or at least are u n t r i e d . 7 O u r conservative habits p r o m p t us to ask the w r o n g questions a b o u t pupil growth a n d welfare, a n d on the whole the research h a s t h u s f a r ignored the n o less i m p o r t a n t questions a b o u t impact on t e a c h e r s . Nevertheless, certain u s e f u l studies are u n d e r w a y a n d findings of a sort can be r e p o r t e d . I n general, it m a y be stated t h a t t e a m teaching a p p e a r s to have essentially the same a c a d e m i c a n d personal-social advantages f o r children as the conventional school, plus certain advantages not o b t a i n a b l e in the conventional school. E q u i v a l e n t o u t c o m e s of pupil a c h i e v e m e n t a n d personality d e v e l o p m e n t have been m e a s u r e d in the 4 Reference is here made to a project at Troy State Teachers College, Alabama. See G . F. Stover, "The Freshman Program in General Education for 1940-41," the College's Bulletin, X X V I I I (October, 1 9 4 1 ) , p. 8. 5 See John I. G o o d l a d and Robert H. Anderson, The Nongraded Elementary School (Tarrytown: Harcourt Brace and World, 1 9 5 9 ) . * See W. Hamilton and W. Rehwoldt, "By Their Differences T h e y Learn," The National Elementary Principal, X X X V I I ( D e c e m b e r , 1 9 5 7 ) , 27-29. T See Esin Kaya, "Problems in Evaluating Educational Plans in the School Setting," Journal of Educational Sociology, X X X I V (April, 1 9 6 1 ) , 355-59.

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pilot and control settings, and in view of the newness of t e a m teaching these results are regarded as encouraging. Evidence is rapidly building to the effect that team pupils have m o r e initiative, self-sufficiency, and enthusiasm for schooling than pupils in regular classrooms. The brighter children and the slow learners appear to benefit particularly f r o m team teaching. Reports indicate, further, that teachers on the whole respond favorably to hierarchically organized teams. However, there is much frustration because adequate guide lines to daily operations do not yet exist, personnel are generally untrained for their new roles, necessary resources are frequently missing, and team planning makes heavy demands upon time. Even more serious is the fact that enormous curriculum deficiencies come to light as a result of team activities, and team members tend to become caught in the quicksand of long-overdue curriculum reforms. Much of the research to date has been chiefly exploratory and precautionary: exploratory in the sense of "Let's see what the problems are;" precautionary in the sense that "We'd better make sure the children will not suffer while we try to develop this idea." N o w that the research problems are better understood and now that there is reason to believe that the children are in no sense endangered, a new and more solid attack on the research front will be possible. Furthermore, the recent construction of exciting new school buildings 8 appropriate for team teaching and the initiation of university training programs for team personnel, such as the Harvard-Lexington Summer Program, will eliminate some of the obstacles to full-blown development of team teaching.

A SANE APPROACH

T h e last question to be asked is, "What position should the typical educator take with respect to team teaching?" I would say, as the B o y Scouts do, "Be prepared." Acquaint yourself with the literature and exploit every opportunity to become better informed. Take stock of your own staff and situation—adequacy of curriculum guides, * See Evans Clinchy, Schools for Team Teaching: cational Facilities Laboratories, Inc., 1961).

A Profile

( N e w Y o r k : Edu-

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adequacy of instructional and physical resources, quality and amount of supervisory and specialist personnel available, and so on—and estimate the amount of erosion already taking place on the cinderblock walls that separate your teachers. Try to predict which of your teachers have the aptitude for team leadership and devise means for testing your hunch. Inventory the external resources that could be brought in, e.g. a nearby college staff. Make sure you already have the minimum requisites of a good school program, especially a strong kindergarten, and the right relationship between elementary-junior high and junior high-senior high! Above all else, look for evidences that your staff is disenchanted with graded organization and is hungry for an alternative arrangement. When these preparations have been made, perhaps modest steps toward team teaching will be warranted.

IV Administration

and

Supervision

The School Board's Role in Public

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THOMAS G. PULLEN, JR.* THE past two generations, school boards have become increasingly active and have participated much more in the affairs of the school. With the exception of the "eager beavers" (whose energy generally exceeds their intellect) and the outright troublemakers, both of whom would gladly take over the professional operation of the schools because they are confident of their superior competence, school boards have improved in quality and have done much to improve public education. School boards today constitute more nearly a cross section of the population than formerly and are composed of many individuals who do not ordinarily sit on boards of big corporations and, therefore, are not acquainted with the various problems involved in big operations. Consequently, they ask many questions, which is a time-consuming and at times irritating process, for the professionals cannot expeditiously conduct their business. However, though this procedure is admittedly slow, it is democratic, and the public gets more information about its schools than it would were the corporation (public schools constitute the biggest corporation in our nation) to proceed with only the guidance and discretion of its professionals, competent as they are. DURING

FACTORS AFFECTING ITS ROLE

Public schools are the sine qua noti of a democracy—the major protector of the rights and freedom of all citizens. Destroy them and you destroy democracy; weaken them and you weaken democracy. In the early days of our country's existence, the public schools were a feeble but important factor, along with free lands, in bringing about opportunity for the lowly and the underprivileged; now free lands are * State Superintendent of Schools, Maryland. 85

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gone, and only free public education is left. If properly protected and nourished, the public schools become the vehicle of opportunity for both the low and the high and provide the democratizing influence in our citizenry. While the demise or deterioration of public education is not imminent, public education is reeling from a series of blows that has done it almost irreparable damage unless we become aware of the real dangers that beset it and act in vigorous defense. The academic billingsgate that pours forth from the pseudo-intellectuals, both within and without the profession, merely serves to detract attention from the real dangers and weaknesses in public education. What are the real attacks upon public education and what bearing have they upon the role of school boards? DANGERS TO PUBLIC EDUCATION

The first danger, and probably the greatest, to public education is the attempt to control public education politically and to interfere with it through various devices. This attack is not a conspiracy nor is it consciously vicious, although in many cases it may be. Whatever the motive, the results are the same. A second danger has its root in the rise of a new theory in political science (actually the theory in another form is as old as the ages) which is destroying professionalism in the public schools (and in all governmental functions) on national, state, and local levels in the manner described later. Included in the deleterious effect of this new theory and practice is the proposed elimination of school boards. A third danger to public education lies in an inadequately educated population with a limited perspective of the educative process, a confidence in a knowledge not sufficiently refined by wisdom and experience, a raucous vociferousness, and a yearning to improve—just what it is not sure. (The national level of our education as a people is about the tenth grade.) Added to this group is a large segment of moderately successful parents who are afraid their children will not be so successful as they. Every such parent is a curriculum expert. A fourth danger grows out of certain educational practices that

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have helped bring about some of our problems. There is, for instance, the long-established privilege of big cities to go along their happy way in public education under so-called autonomy rights granted under their charters. There are other dangers, possibly as significant, but only those listed will be discussed to point to basic destructive powers. The dangers cited are related in some respects and are not sharply separated. Undoubtedly, you may know of or discover others in your own school system. POLITICAL CONTROL OF SCHOOLS

The first-named danger to public education—the struggle for political control of schools—is an interesting spectacle to observe. Originally our public schools were politically controlled. Down through the generations, people have struggled to keep the schools free to teach the truth and to be responsive easily and always to their needs. School boards were created as one major step in removing the schools from political manipulation, from professional favoritism or nepotism, from curriculum dictation by vested interests, good or bad, and from abuse even by well-meaning and well-intentioned individuals. While there was no set national pattern in the struggle to make the schools actually free, some major steps were taken in many if not most places in our nation: (1) School boards generally were provided for in the statutes, generally elected, and in many cases given fiscal independence totally or in part. The clear intent here was to create a separate governmental body to protect and develop the public schools. (2) Superintendents were chosen by school board selection rather than by election or appointment by some political authority. Nepotism, that is, appointment of teachers and others who are relatives of board members, was prohibited by law in many systems. (3) Less and less legislation in respect to the curriculum was passed by legislatures, and many states required that action on curriculum and professional matters be passed by school boards "on and with the advice" of the superintendent. This legal requirement was generally put into the statutes on the advice of the political scientists.

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These few illustrations should be sufficient to show that it was the will of the people to make the schools easily and readily responsive to them without benefit of the machinations of politics. However, there are numerous examples occurring almost daily showing that there is a movement back to political control: ( 1 ) the movement to have the chief school officer on a state or local level appointed by the chief elected executive rather than by a school board, and the rewriting of state constitutions to provide for this procedure (Alaska is an example); ( 2 ) the removal of the fiscal independence of school boards; ( 3 ) the imposition of tax limitations; ( 4 ) the emphasis upon local support of education (not local c o n t r o l ) ; ( 5 ) the extreme executive budget; ( 6 ) the creation of various governmental agencies or instrumentalities for educational purposes; and ( 7 ) the "bootlegging" into the curriculum of subject matter, some good, some bad, under the guise of an acceptable and urgent noneducational purpose, and the "pressuring" of school boards and officials with crash programs of one kind or another that have some political value and for which the leaders can get money fairly easily from state legislatures and the Congress. It would be wrong to label these programs as bad or undesirable. One bold fact stands out, however, and few seem to see it. If political authorities can place in the schools a desirable program of education, there is no reason why they cannot later put in an undesirable one. Illustrations of educational programs growing out of initial legislative action are easy to find—The Merrill Act; vocational education, both agricultural and industrial; the program of the National Science Foundation, which places through the power of almost limitless funds enormous influence over all education in the hands of a few specialists in the employ of the federal government; the National Defense Education Act, which under the guise of national safety gives the direction of certain subject fields to the desires of the Congress; and the aid to "impacted areas," which are usually populous and always saturated with government employees. The physical fitness program, which is valuable individually and nationally, has its origin not in professional and school board circles, though ever since the days of the ancient Greeks, intelligent educators have subscribed to the

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educational philosophy of mens sana in corpore sano, and, given the money, they would see to it that an adequate program of physical education would be available in every school. (May I remark at this point that Congress does not refrain from passing general federal aid because it fears federal control of public schools; the reason is just the opposite: it fears it cannot control under such a plan. For one hundred years Congress had passed special aid to education in areas in which the members could get some credit and control. General federal aid would enhance rather than decrease state and local control, and the Congress is clever enough to know it.) Local control of public schools is in the national tradition; total local support of public schools as an effective national policy is utterly untenable, in my opinion. And yet the argument for such a policy is advanced so strongly and so persuasively by some political leaders that literally millions of American youth are denied a decent and adequate education because few, if any, local school systems are able to support a satisfactory educational program. Back of much of the argument against total local support of education is a feeling that people will not spend so much on public education if they have to tax their homes too heavily for it. The basic point, however, is that if the states and federal government permit great inequities in education to exist among citizens merely because they do not live in the same place, the governments are guilty of discrimination on the basis of geography. In state and urban government, the simplest and easiest method of controlling public education or of determining educational policies politically is through the executive budget. If budget directors, who may be educated or illiterate, socially-minded or reactionary, are protected by the elected official, they may come to have undue and unwholesome effect upon both public and higher education. A committee under the chairmanship of Milton S. Eisenhower, President of The Johns Hopkins University, after an exhaustive study made a report on the control of higher education by budgetary methods and procedure. The report, written by Malcolm Moos and Francis E. Rourke, professors of political science at Johns Hopkins, and entitled

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1

The Efficiency of Freedom, is an excellent treatment of this point. The power of the fiscal authorities to veto without review the requests and suggestions of the professionals in education and, for that matter, similar functions of government does more to cause deterioration in the professional aspects than any other single factor. Time and time again the professional quality has deteriorated because of such controls. Summing it u p briefly, an executive budget is one which includes only what the executive officer approves and the law requires, and laws are so often inadequate in respect to education. Of course, democracy is preserved by the simple procedure of permitting the council (in local government with a chief executive or a manager) or a legislature to raise any appropriation, provided, however, it creates a special levy for the purpose, while it can cut a budget at will. Unfortunately, more and more authority over educational requests is being given to budgetary officers. Coincident with all this is the trend to centralize all higher education in the name of efficiency and economy. Actually what this amounts to in most cases is a highly centralized control which can determine the extent of higher education by increasing the cost to students through higher fees. I see no reason why government should be permitted to subsidize any function of public good so that only a selected few may benefit from it, and yet this is what is happening in higher education all over the nation. Does all this imply something intentionally insidious? Not necessarily. But it does mean a drift into authoritarianism in supposedly popular government, and it is harmful to public education. Many of the drives for curricujum revision by politicians are due to a desire for publicity, the meat upon which they all feed, but this can be forgiven if they are not allowed to enact undesirable legislation. I doubt not, however, that much of the desire for control of public education is due to the economics involved in the operation of schools. T h e public schools in nearly every state constitute about the biggest business operation. T h e amount of money involved in construction, insurance, bonding, school buses, supplies, and general equipment is 1

Milton S. Eisenhower (ed.), The Efficiency of Freedom. Report of the Committee on G o v e r n m e n t and Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959).

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enormous; the food business is an enormous item in itself. If all this is a part of big general government, it is easier to manipulate. A NEW

POLITICAL

THEORY

What is the second danger to public education? It is the theory of political science that advocates the all-powerful elected official. Apparently, the philosophy back of this point of view is that an allpowerful executive can get things done in a hurry. Some advocates of this theory claim they are liberals, so impatient with the slow pace of deliberative government and legislation they would do away with local governmental lines and give the executive the right to impose his will upon the legislative branch. Actually, such are not liberals but authoritarians. Apparently they have never heard of Montesquieu or else they disagree with him violently. In his The Spirt of Laws he says: The political liberty of the subject is a tranquility of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another. When the legislative and executive powers are unified in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.2 Some of the younger of these starry-eyed individuals will tell you that a system of government where the schools are under school boards actually means two governments and therefore no control. Notice the word "control." There are certain organizations that make surveys of governments, local, state, and, I suppose, national, or the branches thereof. The recommendations of some of these organizations follow a pattern; as a matter of fact, a good deal of money could be saved by those surveyed if they would simply buy one of the books on this subject and apply it to their own situation. Some years ago a surveying organization made a study of one of the local political subdivisions in Maryland. In respect to public education, it recommended the elimination of the school board, the creation of a departBaron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Vol. I, Book XI, paragraph 6, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: The Colonial Press, 1900), p. 151. 1

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ment of education within the county government, and the appointment of the superintendent of schools by the county commissioners. Public education is too precious a commodity to entrust to the good intentions of any one individual, no matter how sincere. Public education must be the concern of all, not just the elected officials. Even good intentions may have deleterious results. The debacle in Congress in respect to public education, regardless of the intentions of all concerned and of their effort or lack of effort, has resulted in the worst blow to public education that has occurred in America within generations. It would have been better had no effort been made to pass any legislation. Why? The defeat of a major bill for general education has made respectable the defeat of similar bills on the state and local level. Public education and public service are of such concern to the public that all those who are participants in legislation must be involved. The implication to school boards respecting a nation-wide system of control and direction of public (and possibly private) education should be obvious. AN INADEQUATELY EDUCATED POPULATION

The enormous size of the public school system in America makes it an easy target for every critic. Its diversity in organization and program makes it incapable of proper defense against concentrated attacks by those who would destroy or limit its effectiveness. Size does not give the school system imperviousness; there is such a thing as whittling down or undermining the foundations of a mammoth building. It is a curious commentary upon unenlightened human nature that whenever it sees a thing big and strong and running well it wants to attack it! For example, this statement is applicable to the attitude of much of the world to the United States. Progress is rarely engendered and developed by the privileged. One of the most curious of all psychological phenomena is the almost emotional feeling of the possessors of certain types of education that theirs is the best and that all who are educated in other ways are "Philistines." Unfortunately, even some of the classically educated are not innocent of this feeling, whereas the truly educated is not an absolutist in his thoughts on education.

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Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more. 3

Let me illustrate my point. The classically educated of the early days generally were content with the knowledge gained from the Greeks and the Romans, enjoyed the ability to read in the ancient languages, and confined their professional work, if any, to the law and the Gospel. Reforms came in education from the desire of those who wanted something different and more applicable to their needs. This is why the Latin grammar school grew into the academy with its broader and more practical education. Later still the academy grew into the public high school. The early high school attempted to ape the early Latin grammar school and attempted to make classicists of all. As the student population became more cosmopolitan and varied in ability and desires, the high school hardened its curriculum, and wisely, I think. Now we are looking backward under pressure from those who do not understand what really existed but who think the "good old days" sounds good. Change comes in response to some real need which generally is of a practical nature, for those who enjoy privileges do not give them up easily. There is no counterpart of the American public high school anywhere in the world. No nation except America has ever dared to attempt extended education of all its youth. Some nations have trained all their youth up to a certain point, but with disastrous results; for mere training breaks down when initiative is demanded. What has happened as a result of our system? We have educated scholars, doctors, lawyers, teachers, ministers, and other professionals comparable with the best in the world. We have educated our people to a high degree of literacy—the highest in the world—and we are now a nation of tenth-graders, according to the 1960 Census statistics. There are those who poke fun at the education of the average American and compare him most unfavorably with the small number of highly educated Europeans. (Why is it that everything we do must be compared unfavorably with the European? Now we hear that our children cannot do as many "push-ups" and "bar chinning" as 'William Cowper, "The Task, Book VI Winter Walk at Noon," line 96, The Poems of William Cowper, Esq. (New York: Charles Wells, 1835), p. 282.

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the European. Incidentally, I have no faith in such figures. I suppose the youth groups of Hitler and Mussolini and other dictators of Europe were proficient in push-ups and similar activities, because they lent themselves to spectacular mass demonstrations, as valuable psychologically as physical. I have nothing against push-ups—I did my share of them in the Marine Corps.) The level of education in our nation is one of our greatest strengths; yet it is also one of our greatest weaknesses. True, it is only a stage in our movement toward a much higher level of education. What the ultimate national level of public education should be 1 do not know, but when free men govern themselves, they cannot know too much! In authoritarian countries, decisions in all fields, including education, are made by the selected few, and for the most part these leaders are educated in an especial way and pattern. They decide what is good for everyone, and they regulate things pretty well so that the status quo is preserved. In a democracy, however, everyone participates or has the right to participate in the processes of government, a sublime and yet a dangerous doctrine if all citizens are not sufficiently enlightened to act intelligently. Our public schools belong to the people and should be easily and quickly responsive to their wishes and their needs. And yet there is a danger in fulfilling demands that are not well considered by the educated and mature citizenry. In our progress toward a highly educated citizenry we have reached the point where we have made even stupidity articulate. But far better it is to be able to say a stupid thing than to be inarticulate or afraid to speak! (In my opinion one of the reasons for the present world situation is that all nations are becoming articulate and less afraid to speak, and I do not decry this; it means progress with periods of travail.) The people of America, en masse, have reached a level of education that stimulates them to desire even more for their children. Their sensibilities are more refined, and they are disturbed and concerned when their children do not get the kind of education they envision. And they speak out. And this is good. But they can be easily swayed by all sorts of suggested panaceas, regardless of whether the proposer is sincere or a demagogue. They grasp at any solution without understanding all the implications. T o o often they think that excelling

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means excellence. If the Hitler youth, who was trained but not educated, can through special training do so many push-ups, their children must do the same; if the waiters in French restaurants can command only a few phrases in English to reply to questions about the menu, their children must become experts in the use of the language (I believe in a sound foreign language program in our schools; I was a language teacher), and if the Chinese can eat so many bowls of rice with chopsticks in so many minutes, their children must be able to rival them. These are signs of immaturity, but an immaturity that is willing to learn. Americans in general are willing to submit to national tests, prepared by fallible and often half-educated men, to discover what ought to be done to make us superior as a nation among nations. And yet, listening to the politicians who believe in pork-barrel politics but oppose federal aid to education, these same people oppose national aid that would guarantee a decent program of education to every American citizen. Competition is in the American tradition; so are the public schools, and they go hand in hand. The public school is the most competitive of all American institutions. It is the basis of the free enterprise system and the health of our nation. The public schools are and should be the greatest stabilizing force in our democracy. They must be free to seek the truth wherever it may be, and they must not sway with every wind that blows from any unstable area. Improper controls and direction are undemocratic.

PRACTICES THAT CREATE PROBLEMS

The foregoing is prologue. Although no lengthy comment on the educational practices that have contributed to some of our problems is given here, reference is made briefly to the tendency in certain sections of the country to isolate the educational system from all others and to attempt to develop it along a single line. Generally such systems have been large and unwieldly, operating under a single head and closely allied to local government. Inherent in such bigness and autonomy is the loss of professional control. School board members in such cases have often arrogated unto themselves certain phases

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of operation, have acted as the representatives of certain groups of constituents, and have very generally upset the national pattern in public education with no great enhancement of public education— quite the contrary, The big city systems, for example, probably have been the cause of more headaches in public education than any other factor. Under the early conception of autonomy, big city schools received certain rights to act independently of the State, the center of American government, and they quickly manifested every weakness cited above. Added to this fact, cities have a metropolitan press, which generally has visions of grandeur and omniscience and has publicized widely every silly program in order to attract public attention. The press, unfortunately, fails to see the big changes in American life. T h e public school people more than two decades ago predicted the present plight of the cities and were roundly abused by the press and politicians. School boards catering to the press developed a set pattern of administration which failed to see the changing nature of the big cities; some of them are comparable today in need and support with sections of Mississippi or Maine. In addition, they had all the weaknesses of bigness plus lack of direction professionally. What has all this to do with the role of school boards in public education? The answer is simple. School boards are the preservers of this instrumentality of our democracy. If school boards are to be abolished and education become a department of local government, the education of our youth will suffer. Maybe the public school system is another branch of government, but is that bad? It is a cheap price to pay for liberty. School boards are needed today more than ever in the history of our public schools. More than ever we need school board members who are dedicated to the principle that all our liberties and freedom are dependent upon an enlightened and aroused citizenry and who have confidence in the ultimate wisdom of the great mass of citizens whose minds are free and disciplined by enlightenment. Truly the schools are what the school boards want to make them. And this is the American tradition.

The Law and the Curriculum E. E D M U N D R E U T T E R , JR.* of reference useful in delineating some of the elements in the vast complex of relationships between the law and the curriculum is that of governmental levels. In the United States, education is a function of state government as distinguished from federal and local governments. This legal situation, arising from the Tenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, means in effect that a state, acting through its legislature, has complete authority over the instructional program in the public schools of that state except as there may be restrictions on the power of the legislature imposed by the state constitution or as there may be restrictions imposed by the Federal Constitution and its Amendments protecting individual rights. O N E FRAME

CONTROL AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL

Increasing numbers of cases bearing on education are being heard by the Supreme Court of the United States, and thus through the judiciary come rulings that the Federal Constitution forbids certain actions by the states. As examples, school buildings cannot be used for sectarian religious instruction, and the teaching of a foreign language in elementary schools cannot be barred. A type of indirect influence on the program of the public schools of a state is exerted through federal legislation which provides funds for certain curricular purposes, sometimes with very specific regulations as to what must be done with the money. Thus, funds under the National Defense Education Act of 1958 cannot be obtained or used for the purpose of improving instruction in English or in history, but can be for certain items related to science, mathematics, and foreign languages. Funds derived from the Smith-Hughes Act and its * Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. 97

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extensions (beginning in 1917) can be used only for vocational education conducted under certain conditions. But it should be noted that these federal statutes do not directly require the states to do anything. Rather they mandate that if a state accepts the federal money, it must comply with the restrictions governing the use of that money. There is no compulsion for a state to participate in these programs. Yet to overlook the marked influence of such federal funds would be naive, as well as misleading.

C O N T R O L AT T H E STATE

LEVEL

T h e states of the union vary markedly in the way they carry out their power over the instructional program. In some states there are many statutes pertaining directly to the curriculum. In others there are relatively few detailed laws. T o different extents, state legislatures grant authority in curricular matters to state boards and state departments of education. These state-level educational agencies, too, operate over a wide range as regards specificity of curricular regulations. In addition to direct prescriptions which the state requires that all local districts observe, there are the indirect influences of suggested courses of study and recommendations as to teaching methods.

C O N T R O L AT T H E LOCAL L E V E L

Actually, however, it is on the local level that most of the decisions regarding the instructional program arc made. Obviously, of all experiences children have under the sponsorship of the school only a relatively small number in general terms, and a much smaller number in specific terms, find their way into the written law promulgated by levels of government higher than the local board of education. Even a cursory look at the history of education reveals the fact that curricular changes, particularly the addition of new courses or activities, usually have originated on the local level. State-level prescriptions for the most part have followed, rather than preceded, curricular innovations in enterprising local districts. In the typical pattern, a local school board, convinced of the educational merit of a proposal, puts it into effect in the absence of a statutory prohibition. If the idea proves

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sound, it will be adopted by other school boards. Eventually, this now increasingly common curricular innovation might be put into a permissive or mandatory state statute or state board policy. Where this has not been the situation and where a practice has been challenged, the courts in general have interpreted very broadly the implied powers of local boards to add new activities beyond those prescribed. This judicial liberality in construing the implied powers of local boards in relation to the curriculum has been most beneficial to the development of public education in the United States. It must not, however, be misinterpreted as giving carte blanche to local school boards. Courts have upheld as within the implied powers of local boards of education the establishment of high schools and kindergartens, as well as courses of study in such areas as music, science, modern languages, physical education, dramatics, debating, bookkeeping, and health services. Within the area of physical education the courts have generally upheld, as an implied power, the authority of boards to build and equip outdoor gymnasiums and stadiums. While the generalization just illustrated holds to such an extent that in recent times few school board actions in connection with expanding the curriculum have been challenged, there are some cases where the school board's power has not been upheld. A n illustration is afforded by the 1958 decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania invalidating an authorization of $125,000 by the school board to combat juvenile delinquency in conjunction with the city of Philadelphia. A closely related problem involves a school district's offering under its auspices an activity open to the general public upon the payment of an admission fee. Although the courts in many instances have held such activities as dances, recitals, and athletic contests to be part of the regular school curriculum, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, two months after it gave the decision just mentioned, held that governmental immunity from tort liability for accidents occurring in connection with the regular curricular program of the school ceased to be applicable in an instance where a school district conducted a recreation program during the summer open to the general public upon the payment of an admission fee. Another frame of reference for viewing legal controls over the in-

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structional program is that of focus or aim of the control—whether it is directed at substance or at methodology. Substance would include ideas, attitudes, and influences, as well as specific elements of subject matter. Methodology would include materials, such as textbooks, as well as general aspects of "how to teach."

CONTROL

OF

SUBJECTS

Reference has been made to the fact that a number of subject elements are required in the public schools of a given district. These may be required by a state-level agency or by the local board of education. It is quite possible for an arm of government to attempt to require that something be done which infringes some individual right protected by the Federal Constitution. Such issues, however, seem to have been resolved in most instances by excusing individuals f r o m participating in an activity rather than by preventing the activity from being offered. The flag salute situation is a good example, as is Bible reading in most states.

CONTROL OF

METHODOLOGY

Statutory prescriptions or suggestions as to how a subject should be taught usually are rather self-evident and not particularly restrictive. Fortunately most courts have been quite clear on the point that methodology is a professional matter, as distinguished from a lay decision. Although parents to a considerable extent may control the subjects and experiences to which their children submit at school, parents are not legally in a position to require that their preferred f o r m of methodology be used.

CONTROL

IN TERMS OF

RIGHTS

Another frame of reference with which to view legal controls over the instructional program is in terms of rights—of government, of pupils, and of parents. Here it is necessary to recall that under the c o m m o n law the parent had almost complete authority in the education of his child. The entire public school system in the United

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States actually is in derogation of the common law. Thus, fundamentally the courts tend to favor parents in cases involving attempts to require studies and activities to which parents object. In this conncction, it is crucial to differentiate penalties to be placed on the student if he does not follow the mandate of the school authorities. It seems judicially settled that reasonable academic requirements may be enforced for academic purposes, such as promotion and graduation. The law is different, however, where there is involved a disciplinary penalty. Although there is some conflict in the decisions, the substantial weight of authority is to the effect that the parent may prevent his child from studying a subject the school board has placed in the curriculum unless that subject is essential to citizenship or unless his son's failure to participate can be shown to interfere materially with the general conduct of the school. Another important aspect of the right of a child to a public education (and the curricular elements included therein) arises when a pupil is barred from an activity for a disciplinary reason. A persistent example has to do with the withdrawal of so-called privileges from students if they disobey school rules related to fraternity or sorority membership. More recently, the problem has emerged in connection with married pupils. Although the courts generally have supported this type of discipline by local school authorities, the procedure, in my opinion, is fraught with peril. LEGALITY OF S T U D E N T

FEES

Still another facet of relationships between the law and the curriculum involves questions which have not yet been resolved by the courts relative to requirement of payments for participation in some school-sponsored activities. It is my opinion that this issue of student fees will become increasingly important as schools undertake expanded (and expensive) activities. Under a strict interpretation of a system of free public schools there could be no charge for any element which could be considered to be a regular part of the curricular entitlement. Modern definitions of the curriculum as including many activities which were once called extracurricular philosophically would seem to support the contention that the offering of any op-

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portunities by the school only to those who are in a position to pay for them is in violation of the concept of free public education open to all. Such considerations as the preceding must be carefully examined on the basis of effective operation within the existing legal structure. But these considerations become of paramount importance on the level of leadership and statesmanship in making the law what it can be and what it should be: a positive force in achieving good public education. The law need not be neutral as regards good practice. It certainly must not be allowed to hinder progress in developing educational programs for this time in history. However, we cannot move ahead in using the law as a positive force if we do not understand current legal status and if we do not examine possibilities and desirabilities of change. We are not condemned to try to provide 1961 education in an immutable legal setting developed in the past. On the other hand, we should examine most carefully all aspects of proposed changes. Change is not necessarily progress. But neither is rigid adherence to the status quo.

Legal Aspects of School

Purchasing

H. HALLECK SINGER * A SERIOUS

PROBLEM

IN SCHOOL

PURCHASING

Public demands for increased school services and improved instruction, combined with the surge in school population and rising costs, have multiplied local school district problems related to the procurement of facilities, supplies, and services. Contained in the school laws of all states are provisions which confirm purchasing powers of local districts either directly or by implication. The purpose of this study was to identify the principles of law involved in the purchasing process and to summarize the implications of such principles. The choice of the problem was motivated by the belief that the needs of the purchasing process have outgrown the statutory provisions underlying the fiscal administration of schools, and that, therefore, much public-school purchasing may presently be conducted in a manner not approved by law. It is hoped that this study will serve as an impetus to restudy the school procurement process, with subsequent legislative action to provide local school districts with the authority to conduct their business affairs in a fully legal manner. The amount of money spent for public education in the United States has been increasing steadily over the past decades. The public schools of the nation as a whole have constituted a business amounting to over a billion dollars yearly since 1920, and in 1960-61 it was estimated that the total funds to be expended for public education on the elementary and secondary levels will be approximately sixteen billion dollars. While the largest percentage goes toward instructional salaries, the share which is used to purchase supplies, equipment, buildings, and services is tremendous. There was a time when a school board bought some coal or cordwood, a broom, and perhaps * Associate Professor of Education, University of Pennsylvania.

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a few other items, and considered its job done. Teachers, especially those in small school systems, were expected to supplement such meager items from their own resources. Textbooks, paper, and the like were the responsibility of the pupils. But there has been a complete reversal of this situation so that schools now purchase and distribute hundreds, if not thousands, of items. What was once the legal authority to purchase for very simple educational programs, now, through time and change, has to justify purchases which have grown to relatively phenomenal proportions. Schools of today spend thousands of dollars as casually as once they spent a few. There is no suggestion here that this is not as it should be. The point is that the legislatures apparently did not anticipate this situation nor have they significantly changed the statutes to meet the complexity of today's purchases. It is not a question of how much may or should be purchased but rather one of what legal authority exists for purchasing. With this in mind it was decided to review the powers of boards of education f r o m the viewpoint of their authority to purchase and to delegate to individuals the responsibility to purchase for the schools. I believe that such a study would also include a review of the authority delegated individuals—administrators and other school personnel— to carry out the functions assigned to them. There is some question as to whether or not boards of education have sufficient authority to carry out the purchasing function of the public schools in the most expedient manner. It is possible that the needs of present-day education have raced far beyond full legal authority to meet them. A recent text in school finance points out one aspect of the problem very well by saying: B o a r d s of e d u c a t i o n n e e d t o s p e n d m o n e y c o n t i n u o u s l y out the

fiscal

y e a r . If e v e r y i t e m of e x p e n d i t u r e m u s t b e

throughapproved

b y t h e b o a r d b e f o r e it is m a d e , t h e b o a r d w o u l d h a v e t o b e in session almost continuously making many needed

or there w o u l d

be undesirable

delays

in

expenditures.1

I agree with the authors but believe that state statutes did not generally permit what they implied. With this in mind, I sent letters 1

R o e L. J o h n s a n d E d g a r L . M o r p h e t , Financing the Public w o o d Cliffs, N . J . : P r e n t i c e - H a l l Inc., 1 9 6 0 ) , p. 503.

Schools

(Engle-

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to the two authors asking whether they believed that school boards had the authority to delegate the power to purchase. Morphet 2 was delighted to know that his book had been read so carefully, but indicated that he did not have the answer to the question. Of the same question Johns 3 observed that my comments interested him very much because the same problem that bothered me also bothered him. He also agreed that it is probably true that, if the courts made a strict interpretation of the principle of law that a board cannot delegate discretionary authority, a superintendent and his business manager could not even buy a pencil without securing prior approval of the board. He indicated, however, such an interpretation of the law would paralyze the operations of large school systems. My contention that the authority to purchase is a matter of principle and not of amount seemed to have some support. Consequently legal sources of authority for school districts to make purchases were investigated. Constitutions and statutes of the several states were studied. The most revealing source of help, however, was in the decisions of the courts in cases which applied either directly or indirectly to purchasing. THE

LAW AND SCHOOL

PURCHASING

Time does not permit a consideration of the general nature of law as it relates to school district operation. However, it seems apropos to comment briefly concerning the legal basis for the authority of local school districts. The local school governmental agency owes its existence to the legislature. Of this matter the Supreme Court of Kansas held that "school districts, like many other municipalities, are purely creatures of the legislature and subject not only to its power to create but its power to modify or dissolve." 4 In another Kansas ruling the court said: ". . . there are no vested rights in the existence of a school district. . . ." 5 To an uninformed person casually observing the American public 2 Edgar L. Morphet, Personal letter, June 24, 1960. ' R o e L. Johns, Personal letter, July 5, 1960. *State v. French, 208 P. 664, 111 Kan. 8 2 0 ( 1 9 2 2 ) . * School District v. Board of Education, 2 0 4 P. 758, 110 Kan. 613

(1922).

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school system it would appear that the rights of local operation were inherent. Local citizens feel very strongly concerning their schools and any attempt to alter the presently delegated control would be met by violent claims that local rights were being abrogated. Nevertheless, whatever local control exists is a grant of the state legislature and subject to modification. T h e constitutional, legislative, and judicial aspects of school law as it applies to purchasing were reviewed as a means of determining the status of purchasing as a function of the local school district. The study revealed many significant points. Some of them are obvious, or of general value, or both. But a number of the points bring out legal concepts which affect present-day school purchasing practices. Some of these legal concepts are: ( 1 ) Education is a function of government and is essential to the welfare of the state. Any specific acts such as procurement must be recognized as the ultimate desire of government and should be m a d e with the best interests of all people in mind. ( 2 ) In a democracy the will of the people is expressed through their duly elected representatives. Such expression is known as law. Society, as a whole, is thus controlled by the will of the people through law. ( 3 ) The public schools are an agency of society and thus have their roots in law. The source of authority for any action by public schools is to be found somewhere in law. ( 4 ) In responding to the law which controls the schools, board members and others must be aware that there are three main sources of such law. These are the constitutions, the statutes, and the decisions of the courts. Any or all of the three may have a bearing on school purchasing. ( 5 ) Three levels of government, federal, state, and local, have authority over education in varying degrees and likewise exert an influence on purchasing. ( 6 ) The federal government has relatively little control over education, being limited by the federal constitution, which does not specifically mention education. However, the federal government is concerned with broad areas of public welfare such as national defense. In providing for this and other needs, the national govern-

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ment assumes authority and by making appropriations to educational programs exerts a measure of control. As a result, purchasing on the local level may have to be evaluated in light of some federal regulations. (7) One of the fundamental principles of American education holds that it is a function of state government. Each of the fifty states is supreme in its right to maintain its own educational program. The state may administer the program itself or may delegate operation of the schools to other agencies. Thus school business is the concern of the state and purchasing is an act done for the state. (8) The states do not as a rule operate the schools directly but have chosen to administer education by means of some form of local government. Local school districts are, as a rule, coterminous with cities, towns, townships, and counties. Such school districts are usually, but not always, independent of other governmental agencies. (9) Local school districts are governed by boards of school directors. The acts of such boards are limited to the authority set by state law. Thus purchasing is an act of local school boards but may be accomplished only in light of laws which control the board. (10) The powers possessed by local school districts are grants from the state and continually subject to extension, alteration, or withdrawal. While no attempt was made in this study to evaluate the educational significance of changes in state legislation, the number of acts which affect the fiscal activities of schools is impressive. If local purchasing policies and methods are inadequate or ineffective, it is evident that the first step toward correction must be taken by legislatures. (11) The authority of boards of education may be classified as express or implied. Express (delegated) powers are those which are spelled out in specific terms. Implied powers are those which are not specified but are included by inference. A review of the several states reveals purchasing powers in both categories. (12) A board of education has powers which must be exercised as well as ones which may be used. A delegated power which must be exercised is said to be mandatory. Mandatory powers which do not involve judgment are known as ministerial. Those powers which a board may exercise if it wishes and in which it may excrcise its

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own choice are said to be discretionary. School districts are seldom specifically directed by legislation to make purchases. Such power is rather implied in the broad mandate that schools shall be established and maintained. ( 1 3 ) School districts are generally recognized legally as separate governmental entities with a degree of independence comparable to that of a municipality. However, school districts are classified as quasi-municipal corporations and, as the courts have frequently held, have very limited power. While most school boards may purchase directly, there are instances where the procurement of facilities, equipment, and supplies are partly or wholly under the control of another governmental agency. There is some question as to whether or not any group other than the board of directors can properly evaluate the needs of the schools. ( 1 4 ) State constitutions have an indirect influence over school purchases. Since the constitutions are usually broad delegations of power they, by nature, are more likely to limit than to spell out the powers of boards of education. Thus school purchasing may be influenced by constitutional limitation of the use of school funds, limitations of school district indebtedness, or restrictions concerning local school tax rates. ( 1 5 ) Some states place definite limitations on local school district purchasing. Such restrictions may involve the method by which purchasing is accomplished, the amount procured, or the nature of the material or service provided. When such legislative restrictions exist, it is likely that they may, unless constantly studied and altered, become outdated and inadequate in light of ever growing and changing educational needs. ( 1 6 ) The courts generally interpret authority to purchase broadly. This evolves from the general principle held by the judiciary that boards of education may do whatever is necessary to maintain the schools as long as such action is legal and not contrary to the interests of the public as a whole. As a result, the courts seldom question the necessity of school purchases. This has been illustrated in cases where taxpayers sought to restrain school directors' powers to a very narrow concept. However, when school districts have offered special or unusual services not directly connected with the educational pro-

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109

gram and litigation followed, the courts have both supported and denied such action. ( 1 7 ) The courts have consistently held that boards of education may not, in absence of statute, delegate discretionary power. Since purchasing involves judgment, schools are seriously handicapped by not having the legal authority to delegate the procurement function to individuals. The courts, however, have recognized that ministerial responsibilities may be assigned to school officers and employees. ( 1 8 ) Companies and persons who sell materials and services to school districts have an obligation to be aware of the limited powers of boards of education. Such vendors may not have legal recourse in the event of an unsatisfactory sale since it has frequently been held by the courts that schools may not make purchases in an illegal manner. Despite the willingness of a school board to rectify a wrong committed by it, it is sometimes legally unable to do so. ( 1 9 ) The courts seldom question the discretion of boards of education so long as the action is permitted or not prohibited by statute. This general rule is not without exception, however, and courts have ruled that a school district may not abuse its discretion. ( 2 0 ) The general law of agency apparently applies to schools only in so far as the local board of education is the agent of the state for the purposes of carrying out the educational function. Individuals who act for the school district do not generally stand in the principal-agent relationship typical of the law of agency. Seldom do the statutes define an individual's status as that of an agent for the district and few court cases make such interpretation. Thus, it appears that when making a purchase for the school, a school officer or employee does not act as an agent within the meaning of that term as it is generally understood in the law of agency. ( 2 1 ) While the statutes seldom make provision for individuals to make purchases for school districts, there is an implication that such acts by individuals are anticipated since some legislatures have authorized the employment of school business managers. It is unlikely that the purchasing responsibilities of the business managers can be limited to ministerial acts. A strict interpretation of the statutes will generally reveal that only the board of education, in proper meeting, can make a purchase.

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( 2 2 ) Several states permit petty cash accounts to be established in school districts. This authorizes individuals to make purchases and account for such at the end of a specified period. It is possible that the petty cash account provision was passed to enable individuals to make purchases when such convenience would otherwise be prohibited. ( 2 3 ) A school board member, superintendent, or other employee has no authority to bind a school board in a purchase. Whether previously authorized or not, any such purchase made by an individual m a y generally be subsequently approved by the board. There are, however, circumstances where such approval cannot be made. Furthermore, in some cases, the courts have ruled that boards of education are not responsible for the unauthorized acts of employees. It would appear then that purchases should be made with the prior knowledge, if not the prior approval, of boards. ( 2 4 ) A person who conscientiously makes purchases for a school district apparently runs little risk of being held personally liable even though the legal delegation for such acts cannot be made by the board. There is, however, some danger of personal liability where the individual does not act in the best interests of the school or seeks personal gain of some nature. ( 2 5 ) Personal interest on the part of school officers or employees in school district purchasing is generally prohibited by statute or by the courts. The degree of such personal interest to invalidate a purchase in the eyes of the law is not uniform but varies by states a n d circumstances. Both the statutes and the courts provide penalties f o r improper interest in school business. ( 2 6 ) The statutes frequently require that purchases be made by first requiring bids. Bidding may be of the publicly advertised or nonadvertised types and the law sometimes specifies which is to be used. Bidding thus frequently becomes a part of the process of purchasing. ( 2 7 ) The statutes tend to require bids for major expenditures rather than for small purchases. The size of the purchase above which bids are required is often specified by the legislators. In some instances, purchases may be made without bids. ( 2 8 ) Where the statutes require that boards of education must solicit bids, such action is mandatory and the courts have been

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Aspects

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Purchasing

111

strict in their interpretation of statutory bidding requirements. Courts generally hold that the lowest bid must be accepted. However, the lowest bid is usually interpreted to be the lowest responsible bid. This provides school boards with a degree of discretion in accepting bids but the courts have pointed out that such discretion must not be abused. (29) There are some exceptions to the general requirement for bids. Under certain emergency situations a school board may make purchases without resorting to bidding which would normally be required. Bids are not generally required for contracts for professional services. Textbooks may frequently be purchased without first soliciting bids. (30) When errors occur in bidding, school districts may not always profit by such error if it happens to be in their favor. If a vendor or contractor makes an honest error, the courts generally do not require him to suffer. (31) A cash discount which is offered along with a bid does not affect the bid. The courts generally hold that a cash discount is not a deduction from the purchase price but rather a means of satisfaction of such price. (32) School districts sometimes split purchases so that any single order does not exceed the statutory limit above which bids must be solicited. The courts generally hold that purchases may not be split in order to circumvent the statutory requirements. (33) Most states specifically give boards of education the power to make contracts. Contracts must be made by the board as a corporate body and individuals may not contract for the board. The only exception to this would be in the case of an emergency. (34) Contracts for purchases may be either oral or written and oral contracts are as binding as written ones except when the statutes specify otherwise. However, the statutes usually require written instruments. (35) Contracts which are fully set forth in specified terms are known as express contracts, while those which result from acts or circumstances are said to be implied. ( 3 6 ) Authorities, in classifying contracts as to their validity, generally categorize them as valid, voidable, and void.

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(a)

A valid contract is o n e which meets all the r e q u i r e m e n t s of the law. ( b ) A voidable contract is one which is illegal in some respect and is subject to being m a d e void by either party involved. ( c ) A void contract is one which is completely defective and c a n not. in itself, b e c o m e the basis f o r legal action. ( 3 7 ) W h e r e the statutes specify the m o d e of contracting, the courts consistently hold t h a t b o a r d s of education must m a k e all contracts according to such specification. F u r t h e r m o r e , in so doing, a b o a r d must act with reason a n d not capriciously. ( 3 8 ) C o n t r a c t s must be m a d e by the school b o a r d acting as a b o d y c o r p o r a t e . Individuals m a y not, except in an emergency, contract f o r a b o a r d , nor may the whole b o a r d acting informally a n d separately so act. ( 3 9 ) Controversies have arisen over the date when a contract takes effect, and, while there m a y be exceptions, it is generally held t h a t the effective date of a c o n t r a c t is that time when all of the statutory and general legal r e q u i r e m e n t s have b e e n met. ( 4 0 ) T h e courts have held that the business of a school district m u s t be c o n d u c t e d and c o m p l e t e d within the fiscal year. C o n t r a c t s m a d e in one year seeking to bind the district in the succeeding year are void. T h e exceptions to this are the long-term contracts such as those in building construction. ( 4 1 ) Ratification is the process whereby b o a r d s of education m a y subsequently a p p r o v e prior, illegally m a d e agreements and is equivalent to a previous authorization. M u c h of the business of schools is c o n d u c t e d on this basis. Ratification m a k e s possible the legalizing of prior purchases, w h e t h e r o r not they were authorized. ( 4 2 ) T h e courts have required that ratification must t a k e place in the same m a n n e r and f o r m as was required to m a k e a contract in the first place. Void c o n t r a c t s c a n n o t be ratified since only those acts which could have been legally m a d e in the first place are subject to ratification. (43) o n the stances (44)

W h e n a c o n t r a c t is completely void, there can be no recovery i n s t r u m e n t itself. W h a t e v e r relief is to be h a d in such inmust be on some o t h e r basis. R e c o v e r y m a y be h a d on some illegal (including v o i d ) con-

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tracts. Such recovery is not on the contract itself but rather on the basis of the actual value of the goods or services and is known as recovery under quantum meruit. Courts generally rule, in such cases, that to permit retention of the benefits of a contract when the board had itself erred in making it would be dishonest. There are instances, however, when a hardship being worked on a contractor will not prevail as justification for recovery. When recovery is not possible under quantum meruit, there is still a chance that courts may permit recovery of property involved in an illegal contract. This holds true only when such recovery does not damage other school property. ( 4 5 ) Contracts, after becoming effective, may be modified only when both parties agree and when such modification is not prohibited by statute.

MODERNIZING SCHOOL

PURCHASING

A t least one authority has pointed out that, as far as public school operations are concerned, what later becomes law may sometimes be first practiced illegally. This approach, however, is untenable in the purchasing process for the consequences of such acts are too costly f o r the individuals involved, for the school districts, and for persons and companies who sell to schools. One solution to the problem might be by enactment of legislation which legalizes current good business practices. Statutes could permit a board of education to delegate the authority to purchase to proper individuals. Such delegation should probably carry with it a limitation on the amount which may be spent without prior approval of the board. Such an amount should be large enough to meet the day-to-day purchasing needs of schools. T h i s is suggested so that the amount does not tempt school personnel into split purchases. Such delegation could also carry with it the p o w e r of withdrawal, so that, while individuals may be granted the legal authority to act, the school board still retains ultimate authority. T h i s might be accomplished by requiring the authorized purchasing agent or agents to make monthly reports, after any one of which b o a r d s could alter their delegation of power. T h e limits of school purchases which may be made without use

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of advertised bids could be set or raised so as to be consistent with the recommendation above. It is conceivable that the limit set for which a purchasing agent could act by himself should be in three categories: ( 1 ) smaller amounts requiring no bids, ( 2 ) average-sized purchases which could require formal quotations, and ( 3 ) large purchases which should be made only after advertised bids. The use of the petty cash idea may be an answer to the purchasing authority problem if it is not feasible to delegate such authority. The word "petty" could be substituted with another since the idea, if it were to be used, would require a much larger revolving fund than is now used in a few states. U n d e r any circumstances, the thought of such a revolving fund is a second-best approach to solving the problem of how to delegate authority to individuals to make ordinary purchases. As a final thought, it seems that there is a need to place responsibility where it should be. Personnel who are charged with the conduct of the schools should be given the authority to act as well as do the leg work. It is possible then to hold such persons responsible for the best possible use of every dollar spent under their delegated authority. This would in no way detract f r o m the power of the school boards nor reduce their ability ultimately to control purchasing. It merely means that individuals could act legally under delegation and with ample control, without continually obligating boards of education to ratify prior illegally made purchases.

The Junior College Today LAWRENCE L. J A R V I E * A DESCRIPTION of the American junior college of the present will vary as different individuals attempt an analysis. To me the junior college movement of the present is dynamic, exciting, uncertain, confused, expanding, seeking, wondering, and above all attempting to establish itself in the educational sun. No one can project its future except possibly in terms of size, and even here there is uncertainty. The most imperative need at the moment is a clarification of a foundation from which the junior college of tomorrow may grow as a strong and integral part of the educational structure of the nation. To aspire to such an end there must evolve a junior college which possesses its own integrity within the structure but with a uniqueness of its own. The challenge to this end must grow out of programs which bring together quantity, quality, and diversity.

THE SITUATION

FOLLOWING

W O R L D WAR

II

While the concept of the junior college is not new, the demands placed upon it since World War II have pushed it very much to the center of the stage. In those years we were emerging from a "hot war." A world involved in the "cold war" was not part of ordinary thought or conversation; nuclear fission was related only to two bombs which had been dropped thousands of miles away, and the words "automation" and "computer" were virtually unknown to the average person. Higher education was becoming aware of a phenomenon which was soon called the "G.I. Bulge." There was rapid recognition that population pressures would soon exert unbelievable demands on all institutions of learning from the lowest grade to the highest university level. The emerging problem was staggering simply * President, New York City Community College. 115

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in n u m b e r s — h o w could we house so many within the limited existing academic walls? The immediacy of that problem was so pressing that little thought could be given to the new directions education should take. "Where to put them" took precedence over "What to teach them." Certainly direction did concern some, as evidenced by various state and national studies, such as those in my own state—the Board of Regents' "Plan for Post-War Education in the State of New York," the creation of a Temporary Commission on the Need for a State University, and the introduction of an educational philosophy of the common schools packaged under the impressive title of "life adjustment." Quantity, however, stood front and center in the first days after World War II, and it still remains a challenge or a depressant, taxwise, to some individuals. Within a short span of time came Korea, the "cold war," space exploration, a rapidly expanding group of underdeveloped independent nations, shifts in the balance of power, and emphasis on science, technology, and survival. As a result, to the still unresolved question of quantity there was suddenly added the problem of direction. W h a t was the purpose of education in the years ahead? Were the slow and painful gains which had been made toward the goal of the humaneness of man to be abandoned? Was the ultimate purpose of man to be survival in a nonhumane world? These questions are current; they cannot be ignored. But it seems to me that, in many respects, we are permitting ends to be beclouded by means. The function of education in a democracy, as defined by Whitehead, 1 remains the development of culture and knowledge to help understand the present.

THE

EMPHASIS ON QUALITY

We must recognize the fact that in the past decade there has been added to the matter of quantity the idea of quality. Unfortunately, there is a belief among some that within the educative process quantity and quality are incompatible. With this I disagree! The great need now and in the future is to provide educational opportunities for ' A l f r e d N o r t h Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Y o r k : T h e N e w American Library, T e n t h Printing, 1960).

Essays

(New

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117

all citizens within a structure that satisfies the pressures of quantity and at the same time demands quality and excellence. Pressures are increasing daily from those who are most concerned with the statistics of quantity, as well as from those who believe that the hope of the world rests in quality and excellence as it is measured by the highest levels of academic accomplishment. As in most instances of human endeavor, there is grave danger at either end of the pendulum's swing. Quantity alone may easily lead to schools and colleges that house rather than educate. Excellence, when it is measured wholly on the highest level of intellectual preparation and development, may result in an intellectual elite. Either result could easily strike at the roots of a free society. On one hand, the Jeffersonian belief (that democracy cannot exist in a society of ignorance) would be violated, and on the other would be the inheritance of a meaningless world by those not admitted to the body of intellectual aristocracy. In the end, excellence must be measured by the demands which are placed upon the individual by himself and by society in relation to his achievable potential. The danger in the present political and social climate is the possibility of making decisions based on lack of facts, hysteria, and failure to recognize the role of education. Schools and colleges are currently being exposed to innumerable suggestions for immediate change— changes which, it is hoped, will produce overnight, as though from a production line, an inexhaustible supply of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, linguists, technicians, humanists, and so on. Apparently there is an assumption that the only action needed is the exposure of all persons to more experiences of a certain kind; then, as if by magic, there will result a subtle intellectual change that will make the world safe for democracy. Fortunately, some degree of sanity is now appearing on the horizon. There is recognition that even in the production of material products, such as automobiles, there is a considerable time lapse between conception and production of models for the market. Certainly in the field of missiles there is acceptance of several years' time lapse between the idea for a new system of inertial guidance and the inclusion of such a system in an operational unit. This time lapse must also be accepted in education. The last decade has awakened many to realize we must accept the fact that

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we exist in a scientific and technological world, as well as in a political world, and that today the two are inseparable. T h e situation will not be resolved by crash programs, but certainly the shock of realizing the existence of the problem is causing a shift in emphases in the educative process. Within such shifts exist the opportunities to improve quality and to introduce an objective of excellence as the goal for every individual, while at the same time meeting the quantitative demands of opportunity for all.

EQUALITY

OF

OPPORTUNITY

D e m o c r a c y cannot be permitted to create an educational system that provides only specialized opportunity. This is the case, to some extent, in the National Defense Education Act. O u r society must think in terms of wholeness, not fragments. T h e r e must be unity, dedicated to upholding and pushing onward the humaneness, the dignity, of man. Education must be strengthened in such a manner that the life of each person is given meaning. E a c h individual has the right to a feeling of contributing and participating at a level compatible with his own potential and development at any moment. B e c a u s e we sincerely believe in individual worth, a program, crash or long-term, which is aimed solely at the production of an intellectual elite would, in the end, be destructive. If our way of life is to be guided by the concept of service to our fellow man, it becomes essential for education to aid each individual in identifying his own role spiritually, politically, and economically. It will thus b e c o m e possible to implement democratic beliefs and evolve programs aimed at the maximum utilization of our manpower on all fronts. This in no way negates the importance of the highest levels of intellectual achievement.

DIVERSITY

WITH

UNITY

Searching for direction for education, particularly beyond high school, there is value in emphasizing the point of diversity with u n i t y — unity in respect to ultimate goals and the possibility of diversity in reaching the objectives. T h e President's Committee on Education beyond the High School recognized diversity when they said:

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One of the principal strengths of our education system is the diversity of educational opportunities beyond high school. N o w more than ever such opportunities are in demand. Increasing social and technological complexity calls for more individuals with skills for which broader education and more training are required. These growing needs present a major challenge to the educational and industrial systems in the years ahead. 2

Diversity, as you see, requires a re-examination of the monolithic structure of education. It may mean less worship of credit hours and other aspects of educational bookkeeping; it points to a wide breadth of opportunity rather than to confines of narrowness, and results in a high quality of opportunity; and it should lead to a finer quality of offerings than before, since there is less need to dilute subject matter because of individual differences in intellect and motivation. Diversity promises a great potential of achievement by the colleges of the nation. But diversity must be coupled with programs built around clearly defined objectives in which there is measurable evidence that curriculums are designed for qualitative achievement of those objectives. It must follow then that demands for excellence will be made of our students.

THE TWO-YEAR

COLLEGE

As one means of meeting the factors of quantity, quality, and diversity without diluting the highest levels of educational endeavor, much attention is presently being given to the creation of two-year colleges. If, however, two-year colleges are to be part of the future, concentrated thought must be given to the structure and form of these institutions. One of their great strengths lies in their newness and their lack of worship of tradition and what has been. This frees them to strike out in many directions and to experiment in breadth and depth of curriculum offerings. They have the opportunity to introduce the concepts of diversity and excellency with freedom. This ' The President's Committee on Education beyond the High School, Second Report to the President (Washington, D. C.; Superintendent of Documents, 1957), pp. 60-61.

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freedom for action must be accepted. Those of us who are dedicated to the potential of two-year colleges must divorce ourselves from the ideas that these institutions are an upward extension of the secondary school or a "sawed-off" portion of the four-year college or university. Without such a divorce, thinking is strictured and experiments are stifled. Planning in community colleges in the past and in the present has too frequently been handicapped by the anxiety of "transfer." N o such tension should be tolerated. These qualms usually result not f r o m the fundamental purpose of education but f r o m educational and social snobbishness. Where curriculums are derived from basic purposes, transfer becomes a natural phenomenon of the educative undertaking. A f t e r all, the high school is a "transfer institution" as is the college which offers the baccalaureate degree. Some high school students transfer and some do not. The same applies to bachelor degree graduates as well as to the graduates of twoyear colleges. What is important is the comprehensiveness of the curriculums in these new collegiate enterprises. Curriculums must be more than offerings paralleling the lower division of the universities. They should be devised in relationship to the needs of society and individuals. Certainly, society needs the talents of persons formally educated through the very highest levels of the university, but at the same time there is a great need for many who have been prepared to carry on competently in the total social, political, and technical framework within which we live. This fact must be recognized and accepted. Because of the increasing complexities in all areas of human functioning, society must have a diversity of human resources capable of carrying on competently at all intellectual and skill levels. T h e two-year college is one place where part of this need can be met. As we achieve further technological advances, there must move into the manpower reserve of the nation the skills and knowledge which will support the day-to-day, cumulative advances of science as these find practical application in each of our lives. For instance, advancement in the sciences may lead to changes in the role of engineers and other professional groups; such changes will then require new and differently prepared persons to support them. The introduction of automated devices to medical laboratories opens new horizons for the technical phases of two-year

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college programs. Electric generating plants powered by nuclear reaction again affects the development of curriculums. The potential goes beyond the imagination into all areas of human endeavor. However, to place too great an emphasis on the preparation of technical personnel in two-year colleges, or in any other institutions of higher learning, would be sad indeed. It would be equally unfortunate to proceed on the assumption that colleges should have no concern with economic and occupational competency. This is true regardless of the economic level at which the individual functions. At the same time, we must accept the basic truth that "earning a living is involved in living a life, but living a life is more than earning a living." Two-year colleges have the opportunity to organize the experiences of young people in such a way that the two fuse into one just as they do in our daily lives. There can be no separation. Just as there can be diversity of opportunity with unity of purpose on the broad scene of education, so can there be diversity of individual programs leading to unity in the total political body. There is within the concept of diversity the danger of occupational overspecialization unless we adhere to the unifying idea of the complete citizen. Two-year colleges must recognize this, as they are bound to be occupationally oriented, for many graduates will complete their formal education with the acquisition of an associate degree. The matter of occupation or career affects all college offerings in direct ratio to the proximity of the termination of formal education to the work world. There is little value in evading this point, but there is great importance in accepting it. Acceptance permits the development of educational experiences aimed at the generally educated person. To achieve this end there can be no dichotomy between the technical and the general. Each blends with the other and ultimately creates a well-integrated being. The responsibility for this blending rests in curriculums and in the teaching philosophy of faculties. Within community colleges, the so-called technical specialists must teach from a base that takes them beyond the mere imparting of technical knowledge and scientific skill. They must be concerned with the student's personal growth and development as he acquires the knowledge and experience that are essential for remaining abreast of

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the realistic social and technical changes of contemporary society at any particular time. No two-year college can afford to have a faculty in technical fields which fails in its responsibility to understand social action and which does not aid students in interpreting such action. Similarly, in general fields or the so-called liberal arts, there is equal danger in failure to relate broad and deep social and humanistic ideas to the technological demands placed upon individuals by the socioeconomic life of modern times. THE

PRESENT

CHALLENGE

The opportunities and challenges which have been placed before the community colleges are great. The problems of meeting them are formidable. There is no easy way. Solutions must evolve through diversity and versatility within the unified purpose of all education. While they can learn much from what has been and what is now in other institutions of learning, accepting a mirror-like image of the various facets of secondary schools or colleges will gain little. C o m munity colleges must aim toward a horizon in the years ahead in which they will exist, with their own uniqueness and integrity, as part of a total structure. They must not be viewed as a substitute or a panacea to solve the problems of growing birth rates and expanding populations. Two-year colleges are a new and additional creation, designed specifically to meet the needs of h u m a n beings and the needs of society. On the American scene, as new demands have been made, a change has always appeared. As we move into the twenty-first century, the pattern of today will undoubtedly be viewed with varying interpretations. At the turn of the present century, those who would have had the temerity to predict current collegiate enrollments would have been viewed as unrealistic dreamers. Today we must accept the probability that changes will be made within the educative process in the next few decades which will make the introduction of community colleges appear as a probing and sometimes faltering step. It must, however, be a step which adheres to concepts of quantity, excellence, and diversity—all viewed with adherence and dedication to a unity of purpose in which levels of attainment in intellect and skills are not evaluated in terms of "inferior" or "su-

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perior." Evaluation must b e m a d e in terms of the quality of p u r p o s e and the excellence with which such purpose is achieved. T h e President's C o m m i s s i o n on National Goals in the concluding p a r a g r a p h of the section devoted to education, written by J o h n W. G a r d n e r , says this: And in striving for excellence, we must never forget that American education has a clear mission to accomplish with every single child who walks into the school. Modern life has pressed some urgent and sharply defined tasks on education, tasks of producing certain specially needed kinds of educated talent. For the sake of our future we had better succeed in these tasks—but they cannot and should not crowd out the great basic goals of our educational system: to foster individual fulfillment and to nurture the free, rational and responsible men and women without whom our kind of society cannot endure. 3 The hope and dedication of community colleges rest in contributing to the blending of special talents with a basic foundation so that men are freed and education moves forward toward a goal of human dignity for all mankind. ' John W. Gardner, "Education," from the President's Commission on National Goals, Goals for Americans, © 1960 by The American Assembly, Columbia University, N.Y. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., publisher.

The Present Challenge for Superior Teachers R O B E R T H. ANDERSON * has never enjoyed significant prestige or success in America. Since colonial days, when the poor fellow was literally paid off in loaves of bread and a succession of beds in which to sleep, the teacher has been more frequently the object of jest (though often kindly intended) than of admiration. Ichabod Crane was neither the first nor the last literary reflection of the teacher's general reputation, and even in the relatively more friendly climate of this century it is still the teacher among the professional citizens who sits farthest from the hostess—if he gets to the party at all. T H E TEACHER

THE PRESENT ROLE OF

TEACHERS

Undoubtedly this is somewhat exaggerated, for in recent years it may well be said that teaching has come to be recognized as a vital and necessary profession. Nevertheless, in the public mind teaching is seen as a relatively pleasant and comfortable life—convenient and comfortable working environment, pleasant adults and ingenuous youth with whom one associates, frequent and lengthy vacation intervals; as a vocation which requires considerably less preparation in years of university training and in rigor of studies than law, dentistry, or medicine; and as a job where there is generally more freedom to "do as one chooses" than there is in other jobs which involve more supervision or where very specific skills are demanded. The public image of the teacher, further, ignores the great complexity of school operations and services. Since the learner is young and immature, most nonteacher adults underestimate the amount of sheer factual knowledge teachers must possess, the enormous com* Associate Professor of Education, Harvard University.

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plications involved in organizing curricula and day-to-day p r o g r a m s , and the vast array of services that teachers are regularly called u p o n to provide. It is usually assumed that all teachers need do is c o n d u c t recitations, dispense information, maintain good disciplinary control, keep black-and-white records of pupil p e r f o r m a n c e , attend P . T . A . meetings and parent conferences, collect their tenure-protected pay checks, and save u p for new hats and trips to E u r o p e . Again I exaggerate. But I think it fair to state that citizens do not see the teaching role as a very demanding one. They disbelieve that pedagogy is, even potentially, an exact or exacting science, and they tend to view school administration in much the same light. If these attitudes did not exist, surely citizens would not tolerate the low legal requirements for teacher certification; they would be outraged by the level of financial support of the schools; they would worry about the lack of administrative and supervisory support in most schools; and they would be asking tougher questions than they do about the quality of operations and of personnel. It becomes obvious that I view teaching as a very rigorous occupation, and I regard present standards of professional entry, of materiel and supervisory support, and of technical-professional performance as being scandalously low. Y e t I have genuine feelings of respect and compassion for the majority of teachers, because no doubt their devotion to duty, their sincerity of purpose, their hunger for growth and improvement, and their sheer human integrity are uniquely intense within the total employed population.

WHY P E O P L E BECOME

TEACHERS

One is tempted to ask, "Why do people go into teaching?" Some, I suspect, find the public image of teaching to be sufficiently attractive. A m o n g these would be the group I call "vocationally oriented teachers." For them, membership in the profession is less a desideratum than is the opportunity for satisfactory employment. The low cost of preparation, the anticipated high demand, the convenience of working hours and calendar, and similar factors are at least subconsciously operative as these people enter and work in teaching. For some,

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teaching is hopefully an interim arrangement between college and marriage; for these and others, it is an "insurance policy" against the day when widowhood, or the equivalent, strikes. Others enter teaching because, among employment alternatives, teaching offers the best opportunity for the further pursuit of intellectual interests developed in college. Academic life, in other words, is the desideratum as opposed to, or different from, academic service opportunities. Perhaps a sizeable number of secondary school teachers fall in this category, their interest in effect being in the "content material" rather than in the growth and development of adolescents or in the business of teaching. I hope this is not an oversimplification, since undoubtedly there are at least the seeds of an orientation-toteaching and a commitment-to-children in the decision of the content-minded collegian entering teaching. Still another group, whose motives again I risk underestimating, consists of those who seek a direct, continuing, and hopefully intimate relationship with young people. Some of these are most keenly interested in the early adolescent, but probably the majority woo the young child. These persons are not necessarily disinterested in content, though their college transcripts often betray an undercommitment to liberal education and to an area of special concentration. These persons may be slightly more oriented to "teaching as an art." but on the whole their expected gratification comes from the responses of children to them as people, not as agents of instruction. At the risk of offense to the majority of teachers, whose mental health and motives are certainly sound, I would venture that in the last-described group (the child-response-oriented teachers) there are quite a few whose emotional health is fragile and whose motives are potentially dangerous to pupil welfare. The woman (or m a n ) who seeks, to an unnatural extent, vicarious parental gratification through teaching is in this group, as is the adult in need of dominating, even bullying, other human beings, and so forth. No need to dwell on this point; but suffice it to say that this problem has been kept under the public school rug, and, however indelicate it may be, we must raise the issue and insist upon straightforward solutions. These remarks may have you wondering about the superior teacher, and whether the topic has been forgotten. Not at all. The

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superior teacher is certain to find himself increasingly involved in the teaching affairs of the "vocationally oriented" and the "self-fulfillment" elements in the teaching ranks, and therefore he needs to think and. do something about the problem they represent. I am not yet finished with the question, "Why teach?" T w o valid reasons are already on the table, one being commitment to knowledge and the other being commitment to children. The third reason for teaching, I believe, is that the functions of instruction are highly complex and demanding, and therefore represent challenging work which draws upon both arts and sciences. In arranging conditions which bring together the "Things T o Be Learned" and the " L e a r n e r "

(see Diagram 1), in arranging the "fit" between the child and the things he needs or wants to know or feel or do, the agent (teacher) performs a function no less artful, no less precise, than does the surgeon who restores health, or removes its opposite, to the patient through artful application of medical knowledge. T o rephrase my argument, the third dimension of teaching is the art-science of instruction, the "flip" side (to use a disc-jockey term) of which is the process of learning. All popular and traditional doubts to the contrary, teaching is therefore a highly technical function which entitles it to be called a profession—when it is practiced with appropriate skill, must be added as a qualifier.

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TEACHER

The modern superior teacher must take a stand against the traditional unscientific, anarchistic view of legitimate teaching. We must insist upon the development of technical-professional proficiency in the teaching corps, instead of tolerating all sorts of idiosyncrasy and unsuitable or indefensible teaching behavior. Though many alternative strategies are usually possible in each teaching situation, often there are "best" ways or preferable alternatives. Teachers, especially the superior ones, must find ways of examining their own performance and that of their colleagues; they must seek, in other words, to develop their technical-professional skills to a point where artistry and technology are equally operative. One of the most important books to appear in recent years is Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning: A Source Book,1 Every American teacher ought to read at least pages 1-31 and 563-72 for insights into the technical resources and the new knowledge about the learning process that are becoming available. In this remarkable volume there is a rather classic commentary on the artistry-science question: A s we learn more about learning, teaching can b e c o m e more and m o r e an explicit technology which can itself be definitively taught. T h e belief that teaching is primarily an art with w h i c h the gifted teacher has to be born and which defies precise description thus gives way to the conviction that teaching consists of techniques and procedures which can, in large part, be made c o m m u n i c a b l e or teachable. This is not to say that the talent of the superior teacher can be replaced. On the contrary, it s e e m s clear that outstanding performance in teaching, as in any profession, is achieved only by those who, in addition to a firm grounding in a c o m m u n i c a b l e technology, bring to their practice a high degree of creativity and inspiration. This certainly must remain true in teaching as well as in medicine, law, architecture, engineering, physics, or musicianship. At the same time, however, the highest achievements in any profession s e e m 1 A. M. Lumsdaine and Robert Glaser (editors), Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning: A Source Book (Washington, D. C.: N.E.A., Department of Audio-Visual Instruction, 1960).

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likely to be realized only w h e n they build upon a well-developed underlying t e c h n o l o g y . 2

With the foregoing statement I would most heartily agree. It becomes evident then that the development of instructional technologies is a great challenge to the superior teacher, who must accept direct responsibility for it. Now let us turn our thoughts for the moment to some other challenges that must be faced. THE TEACHING TASKS

The more we examine the tasks to be performed by adults within the school, the more we realize that they are of varying degrees of importance and of difficulty in achieving. If we take the total of "Things To Be Taught" and "Services To Be Performed" (in Diagram 1), and examine them in terms of (a) their relative priority and (b) the skill required to do them, we find that some are neither very important nor very complicated (in Diagram 2, # 4 ) , some are rather important but not very complicated (in Diagram 2, # 3 ) , some are still more important and also require notable insight and skill to perform (Diagram 2, # 2 ) , and the remainder are of greatest important and extremely difficult to accomplish (Diagram 2, # 1 ) . Conventional school organization requires all teachers, regardless of their training, their experience, or their over-all qualifications, to perform work in all four categories. As a result many "Category 1" functions are dangerously mishandled by the inept, many "Category 4 " functions eat up the time and energy of superior teachers, and so on. We are indebted to Bay City and Yale-Fairfield and other studies which have illuminated this problem, for it is a foolish personnel practice to ask master teachers to supervise corridors or tally attendance statistics, for example. This idea, by the way, seems to have gained acceptance in recent years, though we still find some who would justify teacher participation in all "Category 4" work on the red-herring argument that it helps know the whole child. In my view, good teachers need only samples of these lower-priority items to make appropriate assessments of the child's needs. 1

ibid., p. 564.

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O n the other side of this coin, it is unrealistic and unfair to place beginning teachers or less competent teachers in a position where without help they are accountable for "Category 1" and " 2 " services. T h e challenge, obviously, is that superior teachers need to recognize this injustice, and arrange their affairs so that the nonsuperior teachers will not be left in such a predicament.

Diagram 2 Total of Things to Be Taught and Services to be Performed in the School Φ (1)

^

^

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λ

W

.

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requires competent teacher

(2) Ο

Φ

requires superior teacher .

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non-professional can perform some; routine for teachers

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. »

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(4)

non-professional can perform all

φ > φ

If there is any validity in these arguments, and in view of the harsh fact that too few superior teachers are available in the schools today, it would seem that the traditional isolation and independence of the classroom teacher must ultimately change in the direction of co-operative-collaborative arrangements. I am not necessarily arguing that teaching teams represent the likeliest or most desirable arrangement, but I am saying in effect that the elementary and secondary classroom teacher of tomorrow will be more intimately associated

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with his fellows, and that the relatively simple ideal of "each teacher the Κ ί π ςΟ in his own classroom" has vanished into thin air. THE A L L O C A T I O N

OF

PERSONNEL

In fact, it seems almost certain that the personnel structure of future American schools will be both elaborate and complex. It will call for differentiated roles and responsibilities, some of these at a subprofessional and/or paraprofessional level, some calling for skills of essentially the same sort now possessed by the reasonably competent teacher, and some requiring a high degree of technical-professional knowledge and expertise. The roles which call f o r advanced competencies and influence may sometimes be nonsupervisory in nature and sometimes require the exercise of leadership-with-responsibility. These latter roles will be especially prized and rewarded by the citizenry, and it is not unlikely that the career "teacher specialists" who exercise leadership-with-responsibility shall enjoy the same respect and prestige usually accorded to the medical doctor. A n d so relentlessly I have moved our argument to the point where an equalitarian view of classroom teachers is untenable. The superior teacher must stop being embarrassed by, or afraid of, his competence. He must seek, rather, to increase it, and he must feel obliged to put it to work in the interests of others. He must seek constantly to enhance his mastery of content, to enlarge his understanding of children and how they grow, and above all seek to develop technical-professional skills and understandings of the highest possible order. There is one other obligation—no, let us call it opportunity—of the superior teacher. In American education we suffer from a disease of localitis. We cherish the local control of our schools; we f e a r Federal support; we reject the idea of national curriculum; we distrust national organizations; we value the privilege of doing things in our own way. Some of these attitudes are of course reasonable. B u t perhaps we have carried provincialism too far. In these days when knowledge is exploding and research findings are bursting out of the universities and " c h a n g e " is the only constant in our experience, it becomes foolhardy f o r each school and community to try to do the whole job of upgrading curriculum and personnel on its own. T h e

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good teachers need each other, and the jobs need somehow to be divided up among us all. We cannot expect the vocationally oriented, or the "maritalinterim" group, or the less talented among us to become effectively involved in these difficult and continuing tasks. It will have to be the superior teachers who reach out, as well as upward. These people must establish at least regional identifications and participate as much as possible at the national level. All this suggests that the superior teacher can in part be identified by the extent of the professional library he maintains, by the specialized professional magazines he regularly reads, by his active participation in national or regional groups (as well as local), and by the extent of his outreach to others through writings, through personal contact, and the like. It means that the superior teachers of America might achieve an ideal all too seldom realized even at the local level, the ideal of a community of scholars. And professional scholarship, no less than professional practice, will come to be a central aspect of the superior teacher's life.

ν The Student and the School

Keeping the Normal Child

Normal

R A C H E L DUNAWAY COX * of normal behavior or a normal person, we make some assumptions as to what is meant by normal. Yet if we threw the discussion open at this moment for definition of the normal, we would hear from different individuals and from various points of view a wide divergence of emphases and interest. This was very well illustrated in a hypothetical symposium which Pennington and Berg have offered in their volume entitled Introduction to Clinical Psychology.1 Representatives of statistics, psychology, biology, education, medicine, law, psychiatry, and theology are presented as assembling to discuss and to try to reach a common notion of what constitutes normal behavior. I N ANY DISCUSSION

DEFINITIONS O F

NORMALITY

The statistician, as we would expect, spoke in terms of averages with populations distributed around arithmetic means and with the great majority of individuals bunched fairly closely around that mean. Those who fall one standard deviation above or below that mean are ipso facto beyond the normal range and thus unusual enough, different enough, from their fellows to be thought of as abnormal—or perhaps subnormal. The psychologist, striving for exactness, shied away from over-all measures and insisted that individuals be considered not as wholes but as aggregations of different variables on which the psychologist might get a measure of his standing. He protested, "Does it make any sense, really, to talk about a given person being either normal or * Professor of Education and Psychology, Bryn Mawr College. L . A. Pennington and Irwin A. Berg, Introduction to Clinical ( N e w Y o r k : Ronald Press, 1 9 4 8 ) , Ch. 2.

1

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abnormal in any comprehensive way? Must wc not always speak of a person as normal or abnormal in respect to some specific measurable characteristic? " 2 T h e sociologist stressed that most behavior is shaped by social forces which are ever-present and powerful, so that the question of conformity is significant. A numerical average of cases or behaviors is less a reflection of normality than conformity to the socially imposed standard. In some situations, the fact that practically all members of a group do or do not engage in a particular behavior makes nonconformity abnormal. We deal here with a J-shaped, rather than a bell-shaped distribution. Paying one's income tax might presumably be such a kind of conformity. The biologist expressed the notion that a normal organism is one which functions in accord with its own design or pattern. Accordingly, normal behavior is that for which the structure of the organism fits it. Efficiency is the goal toward which an organism should strive. Efficiency for what? T h e biologist answers firmly—efficiency for survival. Normal function implies homeostasis in which there is balance within the physiological organism, in tune with its environment and functioning suitably in that environment. T h e psychiatrist remarked wryly that the abnormal person is the m a n who is in such disharmony with those around him that his fellows are "highly motivated to get him out of the way. The normal person is somewhat better tolerated." 3 T h e upshot of the discussion was that each individual is subject not only to physical and psychic forces within but is determined at the same time by physical and social factors without. A concert of inner needs and social demands must be orchestrated into some sort of harmony if the individual is to become a proper sort of person in a particular time and place. Struggles internal and external mark his development. T o the degree that the individual is able to assimilate and use appropriately both the lessons his own body teaches and those the society holds out to him, he may be thought to be normal. Lest this suggest normal behavior as acquiescence to a strait jacket of conformity, the symposium participants hastened to add that the in3 3

ibid. Ibid.

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dividual must develop between his particular cherished values and those of his society a clear consistency. Thus to be normal was not synonomous with being utterly culture bound. But it does imply assimilation of the culture.

T H E NORMAL CHILD

What has this to do with a child in school? Just this: as we work with children coming to school—studying, learning, playing, interacting with each other—our own notion as to whether they are keeping within reasonably normal limits is a composite of many lines of thought and expectation. Our concept of the normal child takes into account what most children do at a given time of life in the face of a variety of circumstances—be these circumstances physical, intellectual, or social. In common-sense terms—and I would suggest that common sense is the summation of many kinds of thinking, both scientific and folklore formulations—the school child is normal who can come to school and do, within reasonable limits, what is expected of most children his age and do it in a quality that is acceptable. Furthermore, he will come without too much quailing. He will undertake the tasks set by the school for children of his age without overmuch balkiness. He will participate in the school experience without having to be prodded and supported more than is usual for his time of life. In a word, he is a going concern. In what ways does normality express itself in the school-age child? Most conspicuous and most universally there is a certain joie de vivre. This is not to say that ups and downs do not mark a normal life experience. Indeed, a certain amount of faltering is normal, for only the individual "abnormally" insulated from pain and dismay could remain unshaken by some exigencies. But what we do see in children, and that which makes working with them so delightful, is their unknowing joy in their sense of a long and infinitely beckoning future. In a normal child one never gets the feeling that he doubts the worth-whileness of the very condition of being alive. Among older people who have been bludgeoned by life's expected and, unfortunately, normal vicissitudes, there are times of deep world weariness. Not so the child! In children essential doubt and

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pessimism are very rare and rarely last long. Indeed, if such periods come often or persist, we say we have a child who needs help. We expect and we are rarely disappointed in the quality of the child's enthusiastic outgoingness toward experience. Remember the kindergarten song? Merrily, merrily greet the morn Cheerily, cheerily sound the horn.

This is the spirit of normal childhood. Let this not be confused with the fuzzy notion that childhood is a blissfully happy time. This is not universally true. But the will to live and the faith that it is worth doing is universal and extraordinarily strong in normal children. An aspect of this zest for living is curiosity. With children the desire to know, to explore, to see, and to hear is normal. A sure expression of normality is growth in every sense of the word. Not merely physical growth, with which nurses are so very familiar, but intellectual growth also, in which isolated objects or words are joined to form concepts and concepts are woven into a body of thought. Growth in the relations of persons with persons is normal. The prenursery-school child is satisfied to play alone with a ball and blocks, but by three or four he is ready to engage in social play with his peers. His development progresses until informal play becomes disciplined by rules, and rules begin to be used as instrumentalities for the conduct of games. These steps in social growth are part of what it takes to be normal. Eventually the child learns that rules, although made by people, have a generality that governs him as well as other people. By these steps the child internalizes authority. It is normal for a child to desire to be loved and to be given status. This could stand at the very head of the list because it lies at the very basis of all socialization processes. The child accepts prescribed ways of eating, toileting, sharing materials because of his desire to be loved and accepted. We are less quick to realize that this need is no less pressing for the school-age child. Much behavior, both good and bad, springs from this universal need for love and this universal expression of a normal person seeking after assurance of worthiness and acceptance. These, then, are children. We see them every day by the hundreds

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as they go about the tasks of childhood, the growth, the learning, the expansion and differentiation into greater complexity and individuality. It is our privilege to be surrounded with children like this. But in turning attention to a topic such as "Keeping the Normal Child Normal" we are concerned with the occasions and circumstances that make it necessary to give some special attention to the maintenance of this normality. The work of the school nurse involves her in encounters not only with children for whom everything is rosy and marching ahead in splendid fashion but also with children for whom there has been some sort of upset—as when a child has cut himself, or fallen downstairs, or developed a fever, or when, if you work with adolescents, there is a fit of crying or a time when a disappointed or enraged child needs to be sent away to think things over in a quiet spot and that quiet spot is the nurse's office. Many of you no doubt encounter just these happenings in every day of your work in the school. It so happens that the psychologist also encounters not only those who are rolling merrily along but also those who have encountered some kind of a crisis. The psychologist and the nurse may well think together on what kinds of occurrences or circumstances interrupt the bounding normality about which we have been talking.

THREATS TO NORMALITY

When and how is normality threatened? And we inevitably ask: How can the school so dispose its resources as to insure that any interruption of the normal flow of the child's fife is repaired as rapidly as possible? There are perhaps three kinds of crises that threaten the normality we desire for every child. There are, in the first place, situational crises, in the second, developmental crises, and in the third, difficulties which arise from a combination of developmental and situational crises. Let us look at each of these in turn and see just what they are.

SITUATIONAL CRISES

Situational crises are brought about by events in the lives of children where environmental factors beyond anyone's control precipitate

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difficulty in the child's progress. They are not primarily the result of character disorders or behavior difficulties in the child. Yet they cause upsets that may range all the way from a brief interruption in an otherwise smooth-flowing school day to events which bring widespread and disastrous upheaval and change the whole course of a life. When they are of great magnitude they have serious repercussions upon the school's discharge of its responsibility to and for the child. Situational crises are triggered by death of parents or siblings, divorce, separation, unemployment, the taking of a job by the father in a different town, illness, particularly of a prolonged or serious nature, physical maiming. Residence in a neighborhood that is full of bad influences is a continuing source of situational crises. There are, as well, factors that are more under our control as educators and perhaps a little harder for us to recognize as situational difficulties. Under this heading comes the curriculum that is unsuited to the child's needs. Another is the clash of teacher's personality with that of a given child. A series of moves f r o m school to school may disrupt learning. Not precisely situational yet verging on it, because it lies at least partially outside the child himself, are parents who are either too vacillating to set firm and dependable standards of value or, on the other hand, parents who are so rigid that rules become an end in themselves. The list could be prolonged. These events, circumstances, and influences external to the child exert a powerful force upon whether or not he can become normal or stay that way.

D E V E L O P M E N T A L CRISES

Let us consider the second large category—the developmental crises. Development is universal. It involves continuous change and reach. This is normal but not always easy, for, as Jessie T a f t pointed out, change carries with it a threat to know status and condition. It involves not only satisfaction but may arouse pain and anxiety. Thus every child, no matter how favorable his situation, will experience some stress in growth. T h e normal child usually progresses through these crises fairly smoothly and without intolerable disruption of either his growth or of our relationship with him in the family or

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school group. Nevertheless, the educator and his colleagues, the school nurse, the teacher, the psychologist, and the school counselor, know that certain times, events, and experiences are fertile seed beds for trouble. It is normal for stress to develop around taking any significant forward move toward maintaining an independent existence. Birth is the first, and it has been cited as the prototype of all future separation experiences. Other occasions are weaning, the departure of the mother on shopping or vacation trips, the arrival of a new baby who comes to some extent between the child and his mother. One of the longest steps toward independence is the child's coming to school. In the fall of the year this kind of crisis is quite conspicuous. Mother and children take this separation in different ways. A few weeks ago I was stopped behind a school bus that was loading children for what must have been the first day of school. As my car drew up back of the school bus the children were practically all on the bus but the mothers, gathered at the corner, were waiting for the bus to leave. As the bus drew away the careful control of the mothers disappeared. Most of them turned away lingeringly, with looks of mingled relief and regret. One mother was frankly crying. But one spritely young woman did a brief jig and lifted her hands high in hilarious joy. One would like to have been inside the school bus to see in what various ways these children accepted this lengthening of the maternal tether. And it would be interesting to discover whether there is any predictable relationship between the way the children take to this greater independence and the way their mothers take it. We might hazard a prediction that the children of the two mothers at the extremes—the weeping mother and the jigging mother—may well be the children who will feel the separation most keenly. Another developmental crisis is that which occurs when the demand for growth into another stage of complexity and skill is intensified. These intensified demands come to human beings at different times of life. They are normal intensifications, for they are in a sense an inescapable part of the human lot in any society at any time. Because the school years are a time when mastery of skills and tools is implicit, this kind of crisis is likely to occur then with

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greater frequency than during the mature years. It is inevitable—it is part of the deal—that a child shall learn to read, that he shall discipline the muscles of his hands and arms and co-ordinate these movements with his eye function so that he can learn to write. He must learn to manage tools in shop, brushes and paints in art, his vocal chords in music, and his total physical co-ordination in games and sports. At the upper levels he must learn to organize and direct his tool skills so that he can put together concepts and produce coherent bodies of thought in both oral and written form. If for any reason due to inadequate innate ability or of unreadiness to use innate ability, the child cannot rise to this demand for an intensified and accelerated growth, normality is in jeopardy. Even competent learning of the tool skills (about which we hear so much) does not guarantee that the child will function well in school. There are, surprisingly, some children who though adept in the standardized tests for reading, numbers, and the management of language fail seriously in the overall demands of the school. These children though bright and though able to read, write, and manage numbers in a carefully structured situation are, because of their inner distress, quite unable to produce themes, write examinations, or complete assigned work. The invasion of distraught ideas and emotion disrupts coherent thinking. Still a third kind of developmental crisis may arise when the individual is called upon f o r a searching re-evaluation of self. A grandmother who had recently made the acquaintance of her four-year-old grandson said in caution to his proud parents, "He seems like a bright child, but you will not really know how bright he is until you see him in competition with other children." How correct she was. Parents of first children may learn only when the child goes to school that he is very dull. This relative estimate of the child recalls the statistician's notion of normal. Where does the individual stand in relation to other individuals? How many are like him? How many differ f r o m him markedly in one direction or another? This is what the child himself discovers when he gets into a situation which has in it some elements of competition. Soften it as you will, the school situation still has in it implicit competition. Ask any second grader what reading group he is in—he can tell you. He knows whether he is good, bad, or indifferent. Ask the boy how he is at baseball or foot-

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ball—he knows. If he had any illusions about himself his peers who leave him to be the last one chosen have let him know. In the matter of phvsical beauty, which means so much in the life of a girl, the judgments may not be so clear or so cruel as for the unchosen boy athlete. But fairly early in life the girl begins to know whether she is one to whom people give high or low evaluation. If this is not determined wholly by physical beauty or homeliness, the mysterious chemistry of personality decides which shall be chosen, which left standing. The child who has been the apple of his mother's eye loses that precious status when he goes to school. Thus the child in entering the competitive situation as school must undergo a re-evaluation of himself. A t best he is scarcely anything special. He may even find himself considerably less than wonderful in the eyes of other people. When this chilling fact is borne in upon him, his re-evaluation of self begins. Only by living in a fantasy world could the individual fail to know that re-evaluation is in order. This may precipitate a developmental crisis. The individual may retreat into fantasy, or, contrariwise, he may move out to attack the world which denies him the status to which he believed himself entitled. There are developmental crises in which growth itself awakens fears and doubts. The most conspicuous of these is the crisis of adolescence. A rapidly changing body calls for revision of the child's psychic image of his own body. This alteration strikes at the very foundation of the personality's contact with reality. The experience is made more difficult by the emergence of unfamiliar sensations associated with sexual maturation. These sensations and his modes of coping with them may arouse intense guilt feelings and set in motion disruptive forces.

CRISES DUE TO A COMBINATION O F

FACTORS

Many crises in school, however, are neither purely situational nor purely developmental, although to be sure such single presentations do occur. But more frequent are the threats to normality when a developmental hurdle is made the more difficult because of a situational crisis. Those who work in the schools with underprivileged children probably see far more of this than do those in suburban schools where

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most of the children are tenderly nurtured. Nevertheless, even in the most gently reared child's life there are occasions in which his need to take a new step of growth, his need to master challenging learning, his necessity to re-evaluate himself come simultaneously with an inescapable catastrophe of his outer world. The family moves at some crucial point in school learning, as when the class is learning to write cursive. The child becomes sick at a critical point in the mastery of numbers. ( A college student once told me, in accounting for the fact that she was desperately afraid of statistics, that she had come down with a severe case of tonsilitis when the second graders were learning the two's. She said, "I have never caught up.' : ) Last year we encountered a six-year-old who had gone with reasonable readiness to nursery school and kindergarten but who in the first grade, as the demands to learn were stepped up, absolutely refused to come to school alone. The school and the mother went along with this for a week, with the mother staying in the room for part of each morning. Then on the first day the mother tried leaving him in the school room, he dashed out of the room and ran shrieking u p the street after his mother's car. When the school counselor explored this situation, she discovered that there was considerable disagreement between the father and the mother about how the boy's reluctance to attend school should be handled. The father felt that the mother was coddling the child and that more toughness and firmness would settle the problem. While he conferred with the counselor thus, the boy sat crying bitterly in his classroom. Later that day the mother of the child called to find out how he was making out. She was told, as was true, that he had settled down pretty well after the first half-hour. However, at the counselor's request she came into the school to discuss the possibility of the boy's having school counseling to help him over the hump. When the lovely young mother came, the counselor heard quite a different story. She felt that her husband was too harsh with the boy. But, she confided to the counselor, she had herself had three operations for what was regarded as a serious malignancy and she was at the time of this interview still undergoing X-ray treatments as "a safety measure." This mother wondered if somehow this six-year-old had sensed uneasiness in the family and was for this reason unable to stay in school as he had done heretofore.

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A ten-year-old boy of average intelligence was transferred from a school where the median I.Q. was about 100 into a school where most of the children were much quicker learners than he. He was not crushinglv dull, but he was one of those who in learning brought up the rear. Yet the first impression he made in the school was not unfavorable. However, during his first week there, a transistor radio the principal kept on her desk disappeared. It was discovered with no great difficulty to be in the possession of this new pupil. Not long after that he was picked up by the police for rather sizable thefts in a nearby shopping center. The school found that both parents were employed and that a profoundly ill and mentally confused grandmother was living in the home. The working mother, with no household help, had to keep four boys in clean clothes and in some kind of order. Four sets of homework had to be overseen. Our particular child had somehow become the butt of the failing grandmother's resentment. For him both situational and developmental crises were occurring simultaneously. Indeed, as we get into the life histories of most delinquents, we are amazed that they do not become delinquent earlier, more frequently, and with greater violence. When school personnel consider the situational crises in which children are caught, they are likely to feel that the environmental circumstances and events are beyond the power of the school, or any other social agency. Further, it has become commonplace to throw up our hands in despair over developmental problems, for surely the developmental deviation is only the most recent outcropping of a long growth process. Yet if this were the whole story, we would all quite properly close our brief cases and go home. On theoretical and practical grounds we would be powerless to right the wrong we see. But common sense, as well as some recently emerging theory, brings us right back into the field of action. For life histories prove that many individuals with extremely poor beginnings, developmentally, do grow into healthy, adequately functioning human beings. Sometimes the very situations that we have predicted would cause disintegration seem to right a child's faltering and disequilibrium. I am thinking now of a spoiled and limit-pushing boy whose mother died of a lingering disease. Those who stood by thought that surely now this boy, who seemed to have been held back from all sorts of

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ill doing by his active and well-motivated mother, would now fall into extreme trouble. Actually this did not happen. Through achievement in athletics which began to be accessible to him because of his increased physical size, he began to find himself in his total life situation. Whereas he had earlier seemed to take his greatest pleasure in nonconforming, teasing, needling behavior, he now moved toward co-operative supportive behavior. This child's favorable development in the teeth of an unfavorable circumstance suggests that modesty and conservatism in predictions is appropriate. We deal in probabilities at best—or perhaps worst. But one thing seems certain: the past, whether of inner development or outer circumstance, cannot with certainty be said to determine the present or the future. As Waldfogel and Gardner put it, "Although there is considerable support for the viewpoint of psychogenesis, when carried to its logical extreme, this view suffers f r o m becoming reductionist." 4 Let us admit, too, that in attempting to account for all present behavior in terms of outer circumstances, either past or present, we lose sight of the fact that past and present, inner and outer continually interact and influence each other.

ASSISTANCE IN TIMES OF CRISES

What happens in the present in the outer world will influence the growing emotional and intellectual nature of the child. Those things we do for and with the child in the present call forth aspects of the inner life of the individual which have, heretofore, had little opportunity to function. Waldfogel and Gardner go on to say: A s in the case of any historical process, individual development reflects the influence of the past but cannot be explained solely in terms of the past. Each critical stage in development can be thought of as a kind of choice point for the individual where the influence of the past, though largely unconscious, weighs heavily on the decisions that are made. But new elements may be introduced that make possible re-structuring of the personality. It is not quixotic to hold that all individuals—children and grown-ups alike—have passed * Samuel Waldfogel and George Gardner, "Intervention in Crises as a Method of Primary Prevention," in Gerald Caplan (ed.), Prevention of Mental Disorders in Children (New York: Basic Books, 1961), pp. 308-309.

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through a succession of crises that may have profoundly determined the structure of the personality and the soundness of their emotional health. Certainly significant in determining the outcome of the crisis is the attitudes and the actions of the relevant human beings in the individual's [present experience and behavior]. 5

Beyond that, even a small action exerted by a significant person during a crisis period may be enough to tip the scales in the direction of mental health or of mental illness, of normality or departure from it. Further, a significant act by a person who may not ordinarily loom large in the individual's total life experience may, by coming at a crucial point in the life sequence, have enormous impact upon the individual who is poised momentarily upon a choice point. The individual so poised may turn away from even a brief contact with fatally lessened faith in himself and in the life experience. Or turning away in a favorable mood, he may by subsequent words and actions set in motion continuing processes in all his relationships so that he is impelled toward health rather than illness. These momentary choice points are particularly important to those who deal relatively briefly with children. School nurses come and go in the life of the individual child. The school principal, the school counselor, the school psychologist, do not have ongoing and continuing contact with a child as the teacher does. They must make their contributions to the child in ways that are unique to the touchand-go nature of their work. But we are, again by the nature of our function, likely to have our contacts with him at the crucial choice points mentioned earlier. Because the individual is balanced delicately on the choice point, the things we do and say are likely to carry extraordinary impact. This being so, what are the attitudes and behaviors that will contribute significantly toward the child's normality? First, we can help by bringing the child gently but firmly into touch with reality. In analytic terms, we do what we can to facilitate the development of the Ego function; as you know, one of the most important of these is accepting and dealing with things as they are, not insisting that they are what we wish them to be. How do we do this? Never lie to a child. Do not evade the truth: "Yes, the needle E ibid.

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will hurt. T h e lesson will have to be studied very hard. The other boy was wrong to hit you, but it was what you did that made him so angry. T r u e , the other kids are very unkind and it is hard to figure out just why, but we must try." Second, help the child to get in touch with his own strength. Sometimes it takes a leap of faith to believe the strength is there—your faith and the child's faith. But as medically trained people, you must know how tenacious the life force is! Out of that experience you are able to be certain that somewhere in the weakness, the dependence, the fleeing from responsibility, there is the strength to move m o u n tains, if the child and the school can only get at it and free it. Y o u r certainty is contagious, as contagious as chicken pox. Expose the child to it, by word and even more by the implication of your expectation that he will be able to cope with whatever comes. Third, accept his feelings. If he is hurt, frightened, angry, let him know you know this. Do not deny his feelings or his freedom to have them. If you do, he will use that mountain-moving strength to assert them. O f t e n acceptance of his feelings is all he needs to make it possible for him to control them. But along with accepting his feelings, let him know he is not free to act them out. He must channel and direct the feelings constructively, not destructively. T h e r e are other functions and opportunities unique to the staff specialist or consultant. Let us briefly list three such opportunities or functions. First, by reason of greater specialization in the physical and emotional nature of children, the school nurse is in a position to call immediate attention to any behavior or physical symptom that would indicate when normality in a child is threatened. The greater sensitivity and special knowledge of the school nurse, psychologist, or counselor gives her an early awareness of deviations. Thus she is in a position to send out the warning call for help. Second, it is the specialist's role to reiterate the basic principle that the stitch in time does indeed save nine. Nowhere is this more crucially true that in work with children. Growth is rushing forward at breakneck speed. Every day brings fresh demands for learning and social adjustment so that a demand unmet today will greatly complicate the meeting of demands tomorrow. The mastery of school learning is an important case in point. Even more dramatic is the impor-

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tance of early treatment of the affliction known as school phobia. Child psychologists and psychiatrists are convinced of the extreme necessity of getting a child special help immediately when this symptom flares up. Studies have shown a very marked relationship between length of treatment required and duration of symptom before treatment begins. That is to say, when special help for the phobic child is started almost at once after the symptom appears, the difficulty disappears fairly readily. The longer the avoidance of school continues before treatment begins, the longer it takes to achieve an abatement of symptoms, and we speak here in terms of days and weeks, not months and years. Everyone is pained to see a child so manage his social relationships that he cannot win friendships or a comfortable place in the school society. But once this dynamic has progressed in a negative direction it is extremely hard for the child to reverse that direction and achieve liking and acceptance. The longer he has been regarded as a "drip," the less likely is he to establish himself as anything other than a "drip." Hence our responsibility is heavy to sound the alarm early. A third way in which special service personnel can assist in keeping the normal child normal lies in her use of her professional knowledge of various community resources—health, mental health, recreation, and educational resources. This is one of her specializations, because she moves about the community and has wide contacts. It is her responsibility to keep the school aware of these many resources and to encourage teachers and school administrators to take advantage of them. This is especially true in metropolitan areas. Finally, a heavy responsibility rests upon the staff person to offer her service in such a manner that it is acceptable to the school people with whom she works. T h e school nurse, psychologist, counselor all enjoy a certain prestige as specialists. But let none of us forget that we are in some degree outsiders. That is to say, we are staff, not line. W e are not the ones who carry on the main business of the school— the teaching business. The teacher is the most potent shaper of the child's destiny in the school, and we affect the child most surely when we inform, modulate, and enrich what the child's teacher does with a n d f o r him. If we win her confidence and respect, she will seek our counsel and listen to our advice. If we fail in this, we are exiled to

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an office or a function that has little vital part in the day-to-day life of the children we want to help. Learning how to make a place for oneself as a staff person in the school might well be part of the required curriculum for all the specialties. T h o u g h there are many aspects to such learning, a single underlying attitude must infuse all the skills and techniques—the attitude of deep respect and warm appreciation for the teacher, for her teaching function and her professional skill. With this respect and appreciation implicit in all we think, say, and do, we will be able to offer nonintrusive and tactful suggestions in such a way that the teacher will be able to accept them.

Patterns of Growth Affect Methods

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LAURA HOOPER * this topic should be, "Do Patteras of Growth Affect Methods of Teaching?"—for is this not a question which all of us who teach must continually ask ourselves? For the purpose of this paper, patterns of growth are interpreted to mean slow growth, accelerated growth, uneven growth, or normal growth (that is, normal for a specific individual). PERHAPS

INFORMATION F R O M E X P E R T S

The fund of knowledge relating to human growth and development and its relation to learning and the learner places upon the educator the responsibility of implementing that knowledge in terms of effective classroom teaching. In reviewing what some of the experts in this field have to say, we find that each gives points of reference which can serve as guideposts for educational planning, including methods of teaching. ( 1 ) Arnold Gesell and his associates give us maturation points of reference in one-half-year periods of growth. These we find amply and clearly defined in The Child from Five to Ten and Infant and Child in the Culture of Today.1 ( 2 ) Millie Almy describes developmental characteristics over longer periods of time. In her book, Child Development, these are described as Infancy, Toddlerhood, School Period, and so on. 2 * Program C o ordinator, Center of the Association for Childhood Education International. 1 Arnold Gesell, The Child from Five to Ten ( N e w York: Harper & Brothers, 1 9 4 6 ) ; Infant and Child in the Culture of Today ( N e w York: Harper & Brothers, 1943). ' M i l l i e A l m y , Child Development ( N e w York: Henry Holt & Company, 1955). 151

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( 3 ) Lawrence J. Stone and Joseph Church in Childhood and Adolescence give us an over-all picture of development describing the psychology of the growing person. 3 ( 4 ) Willard C. Olson in Child Development gives us an over-all picture of development in several areas, such as motor and intellectual. 4 ( 5 ) Erik H. Erikson in Childhood and Society reviews for us the key problems which the individual seeks to resolve during eight periods of growth f r o m infancy through maturity. 5 These specialists would seem to agree that infancy is a time of dependency during which the infant relies on the adults in his environment to fulfill his needs. During this period he builds a sense of trust or distrust in his environment, including the adults who care for him. Obviously if he is fed when he is hungry, if he is sheltered from heat and cold, if his environment is safe f r o m hazards of falling and bumping, if he is cuddled and loved, he will build a sense of trust which is so necessary to later development. All these experts would also seem to agree that there is a stage between ages one and three that Almy calls "the toddler stage" in which the individual asserts himself as a person—the " m e - m e " or " n o - n o " stage. This is a time when the patience and understanding of grownups are essential to the child's development, for there must be opportunity and time for him to try things out, to dress himself, to hold on to things (for "holding o n " precedes "letting g o " ) . At the same time that he is feeling big, there must also be opportunities for him to feel very small. F o u r - and five-year-olds are very much in the exploring, experimenting stage of development. A s the child continues to trust yet at the same time has a feeling of autonomy, he explores and experiments with all that is in his environment, including the people. And as he explores, the world about him takes on meaning. He learns what is big, what is little; what is far and what is near; what is soft and ' L a w r e n c e J. Stone and Joseph C h u r c h , Childhood and Adolescence (New Y o r k : R a n d o m House, 1957). * Willard C. Olson, Child Development (2d Ed. B o s t o n : D. C. Heath and C o m p a n y , 1959). 5 Erik H . Erikson, Childhood and Society ( N e w Y o r k : W . W. N o r t o n & Co., Inc., 1950).

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what is hard; what will yield to his exploring fingers and what will not. As he experiments he learns cause and effect. He learns to look for explanations from people and books. He learns confidence or lack of confidence in the people in his environment. Six to twelve continue to be the ages when children are in school, ages in which achievement is necessary to build a feeling of confidence and self-worth—achievement on an individual basis, which is important for the parent and teacher to understand; not achievement according to standards set by standardized tests, but achievement in accord with the capacity of the learner. All our experts agree that children differ ( 1 ) in their capacity to learn, ( 2 ) in the beginning point of learning any one skill, ( 3 ) in the speed with which they learn, ( 4 ) in background for learning, and (5) in the emotional stability they bring to the learning situation. The experts agree that not only do growth patterns differ from child to child but within the child himself; that because a child learns a foreign language easily it does not follow that he will be an expert mathematician.

RELATION TO TEACHING

What does all this mean in terms of our topic, "Patterns of Growth that Affect (or Should Affect) Methods of Teaching" ? It means that since patterns of growth differ from child to child, methods of teaching should differ from child to child. It means that we must discard the use of one method for all individuals and attempt to discover a method which suits the individual learner, though it may mean taking something from several methods. This means that we no longer attempt adjusting the learner to the method, but that we adjust method to the needs of the learner. Because patterns of learning differ in terms of the beginning point of learning, rate of learning, and retention of learning for each individual, it is important that teaching methods take these characteristics of the learner into consideration. Not until each child is provided an environment for learning in which he can learn, is encouraged to learn, is helped to learn, can we say that patterns of growth do affect methods of teaching. To be

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more specific, let us consider providing an environment in which all children can learn, are encouraged to learn, are helped to learn to read.

IN T H E K I N D E R G A R T E N

In recent years we seem to be losing sight of all we have learned about child growth and development in our frantic desire to speed things along—even our children! We seem to be ignoring the fact that it is essential to the all-round development of the individual to let his pattern of growth influence the methods we use in providing for his learning. We apparently ignore the fact that readiness to read is not something to be taught, something that grows out of meaningless coloring within lines, or copying meaningless symbols. We seem to be ignoring the fact that readiness for meaningful reading develops little by little, step by step, as children develop the skills which make reading a delightful, meaningful experience. Included in the skills which grow out of a well-planned kindergarten environment are skill in listening and becoming more and more sensitive to the different sounds; skill in observing—seeing sizes, shapes, and likenesses and differences in color, shapes, and sounds; skill in finding answers to questions by looking, listening, tasting, smelling; skill in discovering ways of doing things, of using the environment, in discovering books and all the interesting things in books; skill in discovering relationships, in identifying themselves with their world of people and things as they find answers to their never-ending questions of how, why, when, and where. Yes, some of these children will be reading when they come to kindergarten, not because they have been exposed to endless, meaningless exercises which have little or nothing to do with reading or vocabulary building. They will be reading because some one has enjoyed books with them, has answered their questions, including "What does that say?" Let them continue reading, but let us also help them explore their world through the many other media the kindergarten provides—to explore it with their hands, their feet, their ears, their eyes. These are the children whose readiness for reading grows out of all the skills previously mentioned but who, perhaps.

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will go a little faster than the great numbers who are still trying to identify themselves with their world of things and people.

IN THE P R I M A R Y

GRADES

What are the implications for the first year in the primary grades? Docs it not mean that when the teacher meets her 25, 30, or 35 children in September she must accept differences in patterns of growth within her group? Certainly the provision she makes for the six-year-old who is reading—perhaps has been reading all through his kindergarten year, who has lived in an environment of books since he was born, who has had rich and varied experiences through which he has developed clear concepts—will be quite different from that which she makes for the six-year-old whose home is bare of books, whose playground is a small back yard with few, if any toys, and who has traveled little beyond his own neighborhood. To the child who comes to the first year of the primary school reading, too many weeks or even one week spent in reading "I see a cat; a cat can run" would end, I should think, in complete boredom. The school room that is not rich in reading materials and opportunities for exploration is neglecting the responsibility of providing an environment that encourages reading for these alert beginners. Reading materials and methods for the child who is maturing slowly physically, mentally, socially, or emotionally will, of necessity, be quite different from those for the child who is maturing normally or at an accelerated pace. The child who matures slowly will need time to mature and he will need aids that suit his growth patterns. As he grows conscious of likenesses and differences in word beginnings and endings, play with rhyming words or words that begin alike will be helpful. Much repetition through very simple reading material that is interesting and meaningful to him, something perhaps that he himself has dictated for a story or a letter, may be the first step in his learning to read. Some children will learn to read simple jingles or the short sentences of a story in a book of colorful pictures. Some children will not be reading until they are seven or eight years of age.

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T h e growth patterns of individuals are of particular significance in these early stages. T o ignore them m a y result in b o r e d o m for the m o r e mature learner or insecurity and frustration for the less mature. IN THE I N T E R M E D I A T E

GRADES

W h a t are the implications of growth patterns for learning in the intermediate grades? Perhaps the first and foremost implication is that w e must never try to m a k e a system obliterate the child. There are many good ways to help the child learn to read, and no one w a y is right for all children. Helping children learn to read requires more than the use of one system for all. A n o t h e r implication is that, as w e seek a well-balanced reading p r o g r a m , we will remember that the balance w e are seeking will o c c u r within the child and that what is a balanced p r o g r a m for one child may not be a balanced program for another. T h e experiences we provide for a child w h o reads only history will be quite different f r o m those w e provide for the child w h o loses himself in science or f o r one whose reading interests are wide and varied. G u i d a n c e given to the child w h o explores every available reading source will be quite different f r o m the guidance for the youngster w h o struggles through each assignment. T h e dictionary is one source w h i c h all children will need to use as they grow into independence in reading. F o r some, a few simple directions are enough, and they are off on their own. F o r many, skill in the use of the dictionary will be difficult. T o be a good experience, dictionary usage must be purposeful, especially for those w h o learn slowly. T h e s e children will need special helps. C a r e f u l l y chosen exercises from w o r k b o o k s to fit individual needs m a y be helpful and taking every possible opportunity to m a k e the dictionary serve a purpose when information is needed or a correct pronunciation is sought is a w a y of helping children see the necessity for dictionary skills. T h e following quotation f r o m an article about reading by Zirbes adds reinforcement to the topic at h a n d : Increasing competence in reading can be fostered and developed, but it takes more than instruction and training. Competence requ.res

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m o r e than specific habits and skills. It is not a mere m a t t e r of r a t e a n d c o m p r e h e n s i o n as m e a s u r e d by tests, nor is it s o m e t h i n g to be gained by drill lessons or f o r m a l practice exercises. I n c r e a s i n g c o m p e t e n c e is r a t h e r a m a t t e r of m e a s u r i n g u p to ever m o r e challenging r e a d i n g situations as they are in the course of experie n c e — a m a t t e r of intelligent initiative and effective self-direction in the uses of r e a d i n g as a resource, wherever it serves a need or p u r p o s e in living a n d learning, wherever it contributes to the satisfactions, m e a n i n g s , a n d values that vicarious experience extends. 8

And this need or purpose in living and learning will differ with individuals. What is true of reading is true of all learning. Patterns of growth are peculiar to the individual child and cannot be ignored by the educator, whether he be administrator, supervisor, special or classroom teacher, if the child is to have a satisfying and satisfactory school experience. This holds true for all learning, whether it be in home, nursery school, kindergarten, primary or intermediate grades, junior or senior high school, or even the university. ° Laura Zirbes, "Spurs to Reading Competence," The Reading (September, 1961), 14.

Teacher,

XV

Guiding Natural Growth in Arithmetic in the Primary Grades E L L A M. T R A V I S * IN RECENT YEARS, much valuable research has been carried on in child growth and development, the findings of which place the teaching of arithmetic in almost an entirely new light. Although much has been written, little if anything has been published which actually shows the inexperienced teacher, or even the experienced teacher who has not been educated in the new, more scientific way, just how to proceed in guiding this kind of arithmetic growth in the child.

THE POINT OF DEPARTURE

This paper attempts to show what is meant by natural growth in arithmetic and what seems to be the most logical way to promote this growth. It will break definitely with most of the traditional methods of teaching arithmetic which are still being used in many of our elementary schools today. It will eliminate some of the old content and add some of the new. It will take a broad modern view of the meaning and purposes of arithmetic. It will take the position that arithmetic no longer places its emphasis on the acquisition of a body of facts. It will present the subject basically as a way of thinking and as a way of exploring and giving meaning and understanding to one's environment. (Such terms as "meaning," "understanding," "exploration," "discovery," and "application" will be emphasized throughout. T h e traditional idea of memorization and recall from memorization without complete meaning and understanding will have no place.) It will place adequate emphasis upon what we shall call "the new * Professor of

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West

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content" in elementary mathematics. For example, the concept of "sets" will be introduced with six-year-olds and developed gradually throughout the elementary years. Due emphasis will be placed upon the structure of our number system and its gradual growth from counting numbers to natural numbers and to rational numbers, as the needs for an expanded number system arise. In addition to a real understanding of our decimal number system to the base ten, we shall emphasize the guidance of children into an understanding and use of numbers to bases other than ten. Such concepts as "closure" and the "commutative" and "associative laws" of the fundamental processes will be given as much consideration as the children need and are able to understand. Machine teaching and other acceptable devices will also be discussed. We shall take the position throughout that arithmetic is a laboratory subject and should be taught as such. We shall contend that good teaching is not telling or lecturing on the part of the teacher but guidance according to natural growth and need. The good teacher is one who inspires her children, who sparks their imagination, who surrounds them with a rich environment filled with problems within their needs, ability, and experience, and then guides them into finding solutions. Throughout the paper the position will be taken that arithmetic learning must originate in the natural day-to-day experiences of the child, that the child must understand and see the need for each step in his arithmetic learning, and that he must be guided into making discoveries for himself rather than have them told to him by his teacher. We shall also take the position, which we believe is the consensus of belief among educators today, that children's arithmetic learnings proceed best from real experiences in concrete form, through the semiconcrete to the semiabstract, and finally to the abstract. We shall contend that many six- and seven-year-olds can go no further than the concrete or perhaps the semiconcrete stages in arithmetic learning. Then as they mature, they will be able to grasp readily the semiabstract and finally the abstract stage without fear or emotional disturbance. As they gradually mature in their thinking, they will be able to omit the semiconcrete and semiabstract stages and proceed

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directly from the concrete to the abstract. This growth must be watched carefully by the teacher so that each child is guided from one stage of growth to another as rapidly as possible.

T H E SIX- AND SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS

T h e modern teacher must have a broad understanding of the psychological growth of children. This is the most important aspect of teaching today. Traditionally, we lcnew little or nothing of the natural psychological maturation of children, but in recent years very valuable research has given us considerable knowledge of natural child growth. We have found, for example, that the six-year-old in one short year has changed from a little angel into what seems to be a little demon. He wants to participate in everything that goes on but, since his interests do not yet have depth, he flits from one thing to another. He is constantly in motion and, if permitted, will talk incessantly. His interests are principally in himself, his family, and his h o m e experiences. The arithmetic ability of the six-year-old varies greatly from the slow, immature, and inexperienced to the bright, mature, and experienced. While six is an extremely noisy and active age, the seven-year-old has quieted down. His natural maturation causes him to be a reflective person; so this age is a time for assimilating all his old experiences and for comparing and integrating new experiences with those he has already learned. At six he delved lightly into everything about him, but his interests were not broad in anything. Now, at seven, he appears to rethink and, if properly guided, digest all his past experiences. He will sit quietly and think, though if you do not understand him you may interpret this as sulking or lack of interest. But this is not true. It is simply his natural, more mature growth taking over, and he has really become a different child. It is little less than tragic if the teacher does not understand this new child and guide him according to his new maturity. T h e seven-year-old is beginning to be interested in the community and community activities, and consequently his arithmetic experiences and needs are broadening. He needs the teacher more than at any other age, for he usually wants her to approve whatever he is

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doing. H e is not nearly so self-reliant at this age as he was at the age of six. He is more nearly satisfied now to have the teacher tell him what to do than at any other age, and if she does not understand child growth she may think that he is deteriorating in his ability to take the initiative and to rely upon himself. She will see another big change in him when he bccomcs eight. But now he is seven and he must be treated as seven. This new child loves praise and approval and cannot take criticism, disapproval, or punishment in any form. Many children of this age "play sick" to keep from going to school. If properly analyzed, it is usually found that they have been punished in some way, or that they have been subject to disapproval by the teacher or fellow classmates. In some cases, the person who disapproved may have been the child himself, because it is just as necessary for the seven-year-old to have self-approval as it is for him to have approval of others.

ARITHMETIC

GROWTH

Arithmetic growth is a natural, continuous process. While the sevenyear-old will place most of his emphasis on digesting what he learned in previous years, he will also develop further in all the processes. His decisions will go beyond the ones made before, and counting larger numbers will take on meaning. He will have greater needs in addition and subtraction; his multiplication will expand; his understanding of our decimal number system will enlarge. H e will show noticeable growth in his ability to discover. But during all this period of added growth and maturity, his teacher must understand that he will need her close by for constant approval, because he is less sure of himself than he has ever been before. M o s t seven-year-old children are still in the concrete and semiconcrete stages of growth; therefore, the teacher must continue to provide many kinds of concrete materials for their use. Omitting this is a mistake that many teachers make. Those who know how arithmetic learning takes place guide children away from concrete and semiconcrete stages as they mature in their ability to begin to think in the semiabstract. Since the seven-year-old will have greater ability to apply what

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he knows to new situations and since his interests are beginning to extend to the community and community activities, the teacher must recognize this change and take the children on such trips as to a store, a post office, a bank, or other places of interest in the local community. If possible she should take them on a trip to a farm, a zoo, and a museum. Very few children of this age are ready for abstractions, and therefore must have real life experiences. It is such experiences that comprise the concrete and the semiconcrete stages of their maturation. The good teacher of the seven-year-old will also see to it that her classroom provides activities—for example, a store, a science corner, a farm mural, a postal service, and a bank—that develop out of the children's needs and experiences and that are child-made and child-used.

NUMBER

CONCEPTS OF THE SIXES AND SEVENS

While many six-year-olds can explore numbers to fifty and some of them to one hundred and beyond, it must be understood that the maturity and experience of the six-year-old does not enable him to understand these numbers to the extent that the seven-year-old will, for the latter is more mature in every way. He has become a thinking person. He has become a good listener and is more aware of things around him. He begins to understand why we set numbers up in groups of ten. The extent to which he will understand the structure of arithmetic depends largely upon his teacher, but structure must always parallel the child's use and understanding of arithmetic. In the past, when arithmetic was taught largely through memorization of patterns, structure received very little attention. But today when emphasis is upon complete meaning and understanding and application to new situations, structural development must be clearly understood from the very beginning. However, it must not be emphasized at the expense of experience and developmental growth from the concrete through the various stages toward abstraction. The seven-year-old will also begin to have a broader concept of our decimal number system. If properly guided, the bright ones will be able to organize in units, tens, and hundreds and transform back and forth with complete understanding. Their added maturity

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and experience will create a need for larger sets of objects, and they will observe more closely all the subsets that are contained in any given set. Children of this age readily discover the commutative law of addition—that is, that 3 + 4 equals the same as 4 + 3 and that 5 + 2 equals the same as 2 + 5. They will discover that this holds true for any combination of numbers, and they will be fascinated by their new learning. The seven-year-old begins to observe items in collections of twos and threes, and this soon leads him to the process of multiplication. Many teachers today still look upon multiplication as a kind of knowledge which begins with the eight-year-old. But if seven-yearolds and even bright six-year-olds have been guided in accordance with their natural growth, most of them cannot be kept from discovering what we call "multiplication," for it is merely a new and shorter way to add. First the child learns to add objects by counting them one by one. Then he discovers that counting them by two's or even by five's is shorter. Later on he learns that things can be counted in sets. For example, he discovers that a set of five toys and a set of three toys when combined together make a set of eight toys. He knows this by sight or sound, and he can prove it by counting by ones. Now he discovers that there is even an easier way to count things. He observes that objects arranged in the same sized sets, such as three sets of two, can be counted by saying "Three twos are six." He observes three sets of four and discovers that he can say, "three fours" and get the same result as he gets when he counts them one by one. This is the beginning of his multiplication, and it is a wonderful discovery. It is really a short way to add, and he likes it. The bright child will soon discover that four threes are the same as three fours. This is the commutative law of multiplication. He has now discovered his second law of mathematics. The teacher should talk with him about this commutative law of addition when it was first discovered. These fundamental laws of mathematics will grow with the child as he matures, and if guided by an understanding teacher he will naturally begin to observe them at a very early age. Never deprive a child of new knowledge which he has the ability to discover and understand merely because traditionally it has been placed on a higher-grade level. Multiplication had to be placed on a higher-grade

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level when it was taught largely in the abstract, but when it is learned first in the concrete, as it must always be, even bright sixyear-olds can discover it. The writer has had many teachers say that they could not take their children as far in arithmetic as they h a d the need and ability to go, because it encroached upon the next teacher's content. N o good teacher, however, would permit next year's teacher to keep her f r o m giving her children as many new arithmetic experiences as they need and have the ability to understand. Teaching by grade level rather than by the child's maturity and needs belongs to days long gone by, and the sooner teachers, supervisors, and administrators discard this traditional concept, the sooner we will be able to raise the standards of arithmetic teaching to where they ought to be. Modern teachers who understand child growth must have the courage of their own convictions. They must place the child first in their thinking, and regardless of the criticism of others they must guide the child's arithmetic growth in accordance with the best knowledge available.

SYMBOLIC LEARNING

The seven-year-old's maturity soon begins to extend to the semiabstract stage of learning. In developing numbers beyond ten, there comes a time when many children no longer need to use concrete or semiconcrete objects. The best "stopping place" for many children seems to be somewhere in the "teen" numbers. F o r example, by the time the child has a thorough understanding of counting with real things to ten, he has usually reached the representational stage in his natural growth of counting and therefore needs only counters. Suppose the child wants to count to fourteen. H e is now ready to use one set of ten and four more by using representational things such as sticks or cards. He also may have progressed to the stage where he can show fourteen with complete understanding by using numerals. The teacher must always watch closely for complete understanding and at no time must she push the child beyond his needs, experiences, and thorough understanding. F r o m time to time she may have to take the child back to the concrete or a previous stage of learning. This

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means that the previous process did not become adequately fixed, or that the new stage is beyond the present maturity of the child. The added maturity and experiences of the seven-year-old enable him to have a broader understanding of subtraction. Just as he learned that "five take away two leaves three" as a six-year-old, now as he experiences larger numbers to subtract he proceeds in the same manner. Many children of this age will still need to use concrete and semiconcrete objects, but the average seven-year-old should have learned all his needed subtraction facts through the representational stage by the end of the year. Some of the brighter seven-year-olds will know all of them in symbol form. Of course, this will not be true of the slow learners. Some of the slow learners may be able to subtract only by using concrete materials even at the end of the year. The important point, however, is not how much content pupils have memorized but how much learning has taken place with complete understanding. Very few, if any, seven-year-olds will reach the abstract stage in any process. Number itself is abstract; it exists in the mind only. It cannot even be defined. Symbols themselves are not numbers; symbols are merely representations of abstract number. Since we cannot see numbers and since they exist in the mind only, it is rather absurd to expect the seven-year-old to conceive of number in the abstract. But this does not mean that the seven-year-old cannot work with number symbols with complete understanding. In using number symbols, the child is not necessarily working in the abstract; he is still working in the representational stage but getting closer to the real abstract. When he is able to communicate his ideas with number symbols, he has reached a much more mature stage of thinking, but he has not yet reached the abstract stage. In the traditional way of teaching arithmetic the child was taught to count, to add, to subtract, and to do various processes so that when he met certain problem situations he would be able to solve them. He learned the arithmetic process practically in isolation, or at least almost wholly apart from his personal experiences, and then made application of the right process to the problem situation when and where it arose. The modern way is almost the opposite. For example, he learns to count by counting real things with meaning

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when the need arises to know how many there are and when the inner need is very strong in him. Once a child has an inner drive to know, the battle is half won. He will use this newly acquired knowledge to count everything in his environment. In the process, he will also learn how to apply this knowledge to problems of a slightly different nature as they arise in his future experiences.

APPLICATION

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QUANTITATIVE

MEASURES

The seven-year-old will have many experiences which will require the application of knowledge which he has already learned as well as some he does not yet have. Suppose his friend says to him, "I brought five cars to school today and I already had four here. How many cars have I brought to school?" The child can say to him immediately, "Nine, because five and four are nine." But suppose the problem arises as to how many pints of milk are in one gallon. Since the child has the need to know, his teacher must help him find this new knowledge which will enable him to satisfy his urgent need. She will not put it off until some later time if she can avoid it, because right now when the need is at its peak is the ideal time for learning. She will not tell the child the answer, as was usually done in former years, but rather she will guide him into thinking through how the problem could be solved. In her collection of concrete materials, the teacher has seen to it that a gallon and a pint container are on hand. If he has found solutions to his problems by experimenting with concrete things in the past, the child can be expected to use concrete things to find the answer now. The experiment is set u p and performed by the children. They themselves handle the materials and do the work with as little actual help from the teacher as possible. The children use water instead of milk and find that there are eight pints of water in one gallon. After a little discussion, they conclude that there would have to be eight pints of milk or any other liquid in one gallon. Once he has discovered very vividly, as he does in this experiment, he will have new knowledge ready for use wherever he needs it. Of course, he must practice using this newly discovered knowledge in a variety of situations. After children solve their own problems they become interested in

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the solution of the problems in their textbooks—problems which other boys and girls have had. This is excellent practice. It helps fix the newly learned concept more securely in the child's mind and shows the teacher whether or not the child really understands. This is the correct way to use a textbook. New arithmetic learning should always originate in the children's own experiences rather than in the experiences of the teacher or the children in the textbook. If a textbook is a good one, it has been developed in accordance with children's natural experiences; if it is not, a good one should be substituted for it. The seven-year-old has a little broader understanding of fractions than he had as a six-year-old. Many fraction experiences should be provided for him, but his understanding will not reach beyond the concrete and semiconcrete stages. To the seven-year-old, the concept of time has also increased. During his sixth year he was conscious of little more than the positions of the hands on the clock at times of day when certain things he liked or disliked took place. Now, this new child at seven is not only consolidating his previous learnings about the use of the clock but the importance of the clock itself and its use are being extended. The seven-year-old acquires an increased understanding of the calendar, too. The six-year-old showed little if any awareness of the passing of longer periods of time, such as months or years. But the seven-year-old is beginning to grasp the concept of a month and of a year. He has a fairly good sense of feeling of time from one birthday to another or from one Christmas to another. Although the seven-year-old's interests hardly extend beyond his community, he is becoming interested in natural forces close to him, su