Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey

The Classroom Teacher (1924)

The Classroom Teacher (1924) WHAT I HAVE TO SAY this afternoon is more in continuation of the talk of this morning than might seem from the title. I hope the reasons for making this connection between the two subjects will become apparent as I go on. As I suggested this morning, it is not so much in theory or philosophy of education that we need to provide greater recognition of individuality in the schools, but rather in certain practical considerations. It is easier, more convenient, and cheaper to handle persons in masses and classes than it is to deal with them individually. A very large number of people can learn to run a machine; a comparatively small number of people can be artists of a creative sort. The tendency toward treating students in masses and classes rather than individually results in the comparative ease and comfort there is in working with a smoothly-running machine. In learning the behavior of a machine, how to adjust it, much more is required. When we come to dealing with living things, especially living characters that vary as human individuals do, and attempt to modify their individual dispositions , develop their individual powers, counteract their individual interests, we have to deal with them in an artistic way, a way which requires sympathy and interest to make all of the needed adjustments to the particular emergencies of the act. The more mechanical a thing is, the more we can manage it; the more vital it is, the more we have to use our observation and interest in order to adjust ourselves properly to it. It is not easy, in other words, to maintain a truly artistic standard, which is, of course, the real business of the teacher; hence the emphasis upon quantity rather than quality. Our whole system of education, with the graded, classified system of inspection and examination, necessitates the handling of large numbers of students at a time, and moving them on according to some time schedule in large 153 First published in General Science Quarterly 7 (1924): 463–72, from an address given at the State Conference of Normal School Instructors, Bridgewater, Mass., 5 September 1922. 154 The Educational Leader groups. These things, rather than philosophy or theory, are the great forces working against a more general recognition of the principle of individuality in education. The whole effect of organized administration sometimes seems to force a kind of standardization which is unfavorable to the development of the teacher’s individuality and to the teacher’s cooperating in the development of the pupil’s individuality. Wherever there is a mechanical element, wherever we are dealing with physical conditions—space, time, money conditions—there is room, and a necessity, for standardization or uniformity. The danger is, however, that those who become interested in this work of standardizing conditions—the external side of the school work—will forget the limits of standardized uniformity, and attempt to carry it over into the strictly human, spiritual element that cannot be standardized. At bottom, this is very largely a matter of money, like so many other things. But if we ask why it is that the best known and best tested educational ideas are not more widely practised than they actually are, we are quite apt to come up against the fact of professed inability of the community to supply the material means to do the best thing that is possible. I repeat this! Our whole system of examination, inspection, grading, classification, tends almost automatically to introduce a factitious factor that gets between the educator and the human individual that is being developed. There was an English novel published a few years ago, wherein a young girl, whose parents having died, was brought up in an institution, an orphan asylum. Later on, when someone inquired about her education, she replied, “We never had any education; we were just brought up in batches.” That tendency to treat children in batches instead of individually is enforced as a measure of economy. I was very much interested in what Professor Kirkpatrick said this morning about the subject of intelligence tests. He put the emphasis in the right place, I think. There is some danger in putting the emphasis in the wrong place. I do not think the leaders in the movement put the emphasis on the wrong place, but I do think there is considerable danger in the mind of the public who have not had a share in the scientific use...