The History Of Education - Ellwood P. Cubberley (classic novels for teens .TXT) 📗

all democratic governments the growing complexity of modern political society has since greatly enlarged these early duties of the school. To-day, in modern nations where general manhood suffrage has come to be the rule, and still more so in nations which have added female suffrage as well, the continually increasing complexity of the political, economic, and social problems upon which the voters are expected to pass judgment is such that a more prolonged period of citizenship education is necessary if voters are to exercise, in any intelligent manner, their functions of citizenship. In nations where the initiative, referendum, and recall have been added, the need for special education along political, economic, and social lines has been still further emphasized.

 

At first instruction in the common-school branches, with instruction in morals or religion added, was regarded as sufficient. In States, such as the German, where religious instruction was retained in the schools, this has been made a powerful instrument in moulding the citizenship and upholding the established order. The history of the different nations has also been used by each as a means for instilling desired conceptions of citizenship, and some work in more or less formal civil government has usually been added. To-day all these means have been proven inadequate for democratic peoples. In consequence, the work in civil government is being changed and broadened into institutional and community civics; the work of the elementary school is being socialized, along the lines advocated by Dewey; and instruction in economic principles and in the functions of government is being introduced into the secondary schools. Instead of being made mere teaching institutions, engaged in promoting literacy and diffusing the rudiments of learning among the electorate, schools are today being called upon to grasp the significance of their political and social relationships, and to transform themselves into institutions for improving and advancing the welfare of the State (R. 368).

 

THE PROMOTION OF NATIONALITY. In Prussia the promotion of national solidarity was early made an important aim of the school. This has in time become a common national purpose, as there has dawned upon statesmen generally the idea that a national spirit or culture is “an artificial product which transcends social, religious, and economic distinctions,”

and that it “could be manufactured by education” (R. 340). In consequence of this discovery the school has been raised to a new position of importance in the national life, and has become the chief means for developing in the citizenship that national unity and national strength so desirable under present-day world conditions. In the German States, where this function of the school has in recent times been perverted to carry forward imperialistic national ends (R. 342); in France, where it has been intelligently used to promote a rational type of national strength (R.

341); in Italy, where divergent racial types are being fused into a new national unity; in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines (R. 343) where the United States has used education to bring backward peoples up to a new level of culture, and to develop in them firm foundations of national solidarity; in China (R. 335) where an ancient people, speaking numerous dialects, is making the difficult transition from an old culture to the newer western civilization; and in Algiers and Morocco, where the spirit of French nationality is being fused into dark-skinned tribesmen—

everywhere to-day, where public education has really taken hold on the national life, we find the school being used for the promotion of national solidarity and the inculcation of national ideals and national culture. To such an extent has this become true that practically all the pressing problems of the school to-day, in any land, find their ultimate explanation in terms of the new nineteenth-century conceptions of political nationality.

 

Since the development of world trade routes following long rail and steamship lines, along which people as well as raw materials and manufactured articles pass to and fro, the entrance of new and diverse peoples into distant national groups has created a new problem of nationalization that before the early nineteenth century was largely unknown. Previous to the nineteenth century the problem was confined almost entirely to peoples conquered and annexed by the fortunes of war.

To-day it is a voluntary migration of peoples, and a migration of such proportions and from such distant and unlike civilizations that the problem of assimilating the foreigner has become, particularly in the English-speaking nations and colonies, to which distant and unrelated peoples have turned in largest numbers, [2] a serious national problem.

The migration of 32,102,671 persons to the United States, between 1820 and 1914, from all parts of the world, has been a movement of peoples compared with which the migrations of the Germanic tribes—Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi, Danes, Burgundians, Huns—into the old Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries pale into insignificance.

No such great movement of peoples was ever known before in history, and the assimilative power of the American nation has not been equal to the task. The World War revealed the extent of the failure to nationalize the foreigner who has been permitted to come, and brought the question of “Americanization” to the front as one of the most pressing problems connected with American national education. With the world in flux racially as it now is, the problem of the assimilation of non-native peoples is one which the schools of every nation which offers political and economic opportunity to other peoples must face. This has called for the organization of special classes in the schools, evening and adult instruction, community-center work, nationalization programs, compulsory attendance of children, state oversight of private and religious schools, and other forms of educational undertakings undreamed of in the days when the State first took over the schools from the Church the better to promote literacy and citizenship.

 

EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. The effects of the great industrial and social changes which we have previously described are written large across the work of the school. As the civilization in the leading world nations has increased in complexity, and the ramifications of the social and industrial life have widened, the school has been called upon to broaden its work, and develop new types of instruction to increase its effectiveness. An education which was entirely satisfactory for the simpler form of social and industrial life of two generations ago has been seen to be utterly inadequate for the needs of the present and the future.

It is the far-reaching change in social and industrial and home-life, brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which underlies most of the pressing problems in educational readjustment to-day. As the industrial life of nations has become more diversified, its parts narrower, and its processes more concealed, new and more extended training has been called for to prepare young people for the work of life; to reveal to them something of the intricacy and interdependence of modern political and industrial and social groups; and to point out to them the importance of each one’s part in the national political and industrial organization.

With the ever-increasing subdivision and specialization of labor, the danger from class subdivision has constantly increased, and more and more the school has been called upon to instill into all a political and social consciousness that will lead to unity amid increasing diversity, and to concerted action for the preservation and improvement of the national life.

 

More education than formerly has also been demanded to enable future citizens to meet intelligently national and personal problems, and with the widening of the suffrage and the spread of democratic ideas there has come a necessary widening of the educational ladder, so that more of the masses of the people may climb. Even in nations having the continental-European two-class school system, larger educational opportunities for the masses have had to be provided. This has come through the provision of middle schools, continuation schools, higher primary schools, and people’s high schools, [3] as in Germany, France (see diagram, p. 598), the Scandinavian countries (p. 713; R. 370), and Japan (p. 720). In nations having an American-type educational ladder, it has led to the multiplication of secondary schools and secondary-school courses, that a larger and larger percentage of the people may be prepared better to meet the increasingly complex and increasingly difficult conditions of modern political, social, and industrial life. In the more advanced and more democratic nations we also note the establishment of systems of evening schools, adult instruction, university extension, science and art instruction in special centers, the multiplication of libraries, and the increasing use of the lecture, the stereopticon, and the public press, for the purpose of keeping the people informed. No nation has done more to extend the advantages of secondary education to its people than has the United States; France has been especially prominent in adult instruction; England has done noteworthy work with university extension and science and art instruction; while the United States has carried the library movement farther than any other land. All these, again, are extensions of educational opportunity to the masses of the people in a manner undreamed of a century ago.

 

UNIVERSITY EXPANSION. The modern university first attained its development in Prussia (pp. 553-55), while in England and in the nations which drew their inspiration from her, the teaching college, with its narrow range of studies and disciplinary instruction (R. 331), continued to dominate higher education until past the middle of the nineteenth century (R. 359).

The old universities of France, aside from Paris, were virtually destroyed in the days of the Revolution, and their recreation as effective teaching and research institutions has been a relatively recent (1896) event. The universities of Italy and Spain ceased to be effective teaching institutions centuries ago, and only recently have begun to give evidences of new life.

 

Within the past three quarters of a century, and in many nations within a much shorter period of time, the university has very generally experienced a new manifestation of popular favor, and is to-day looked upon as perhaps the most important part, viewed from the standpoint of the future welfare of the State, of the entire system of public instruction maintained by the State. In it the leaders for the State are trained; in it the thinking which is to dominate government a quarter-century later is largely done; out of it come the creative geniuses whose work, in dozens of fields of human endeavor, will mould the political, social, and scientific future of the nation (R. 369). Every government depending upon a two-class school system must of necessity draw its leaders in the professions, in government, in pure and applied science, and in many other lines from the small but carefully selected classes its universities train. In a democracy, depending entirely upon drawing its future leaders from among the mass, the university becomes an indispensable institution for the training of leaders and for the promotion of the national welfare. In a democratic government one of the highest functions of a university is to educate leaders and to create the standards for democracy.

 

The university has, accordingly, in all lands, recently experienced a great expansion. The German universities have been prominent modern institutions for a century and a half. Realizing, as no other people have done, their value in developing skilled leaders for the State, promoting the national welfare, integrating the Empire, and as centers for building up among students of other nationalities a good-will toward Germany, large sums have been spent on their further development since 1871. Within the past quarter-century new and strong French universities have been created, [4] and old universities in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece have been awakened to a new life. The English universities have been made over, since 1870, and new municipal universities in Sheffield, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and London have set new standards in English higher education. The universities of