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Education, Direct and Indirect (1904)
- Southern Illinois University Press
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Education, Direct and Indirect (1904) THE OTHER DAY A PARENT of a little boy who recently entered our elementary school, after having been in a public school, told me that her son came to her and said, “I think we learn almost as much at that school as we did at the John Smith school—I believe, maybe, we learn more, only we have such a good time that we do not stop to think that we are learning anything.” This story I tell to help illustrate the meaning of the term “indirect education.” We have our choice between two methods. We may shape the conditions and direct the influences of school work so that pupils are forever reminded that they are pupils —that they are there to study lessons and do tasks. We may make the child conscious at every point that he is going to school, and that he goes to school to do something quite different from what he does anywhere else—namely, to learn. This is “direct education.” Put in this bald way, however, the idea may well arouse some mental searchings of heart. Are we really willing to admit that the child does not learn anything outside of school—that he is not getting his education all the time by what he is thinking and feeling and doing, and in spite of the fact that his consciousness is not upon the fact that he is learning? This, then, is the other alternative—the child may be given something fixed up for purposes of learning it, and we may trust to the learning, instruction and training which results out of and along with this doing and inquiring for its own sake. This is “indirect education.” Having got thus far, we are ready to ask the question as to whether and how this indirect education has a place inside the school walls. Shall we show the door of the school as that kind of development which comes with doing things that are worth doing for their own sake, the growth that comes with contact with the realities of the physical and social world, which is had for the sake of 195 First published in Progressive Journal of Education 2 (1909): 31–38, from an address at the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, January 1904. 196 The Ideal School the fullness and reality of the contact? Shall we frame our school in such a way that the child is perpetually and insistently reminded that here is the place where he comes to learn things, to study, to get and recite lessons? Before trying to answer this question, let us ask some of the ways in which we succeed in making so prominent, so overpowering in the consciousness of the child, the fact that in school he is undergoing education. I begin with one of the most obvious aspects of the matter, not because it is so very important in itself, but because it is such an admirable symbol and index of what lies back. I refer to all of the school machinery that hinges around the giving of marks—the eternal presence of the record book, the never-absent consciousness on the part of the child that he is to be marked for the poorness or goodness of his lesson, the sending home of graded reports upon purely conventional, mathematical or alphabetical schemes, the comparing by the children of their respective grades and all the scheming (sometimes cheating) thereby called forth. That acute humorist who wrote under the name of John Phoenix tells a story of how he became disgusted with the inaccuracy of our descriptive language, having in mind such terms as little, remarkably, exceedingly, etc., etc., and evolved a scheme, which he thought would meet the whole difficulty, of substituting a decimal system of notation. The idea was that instead of saying that it was a moderately fine day, one would say that the weather was about 53 per cent good, while a particularly fine sunset might be described as a 95 per cent sunset. He goes on to say that, much elated with his project, he submitted it to his wife, who replied that she thought it was a fine scheme, and that she would put it in operation by telling him that he was a 99 per cent idiot. I do not know whether this was intended as a caricature of the methods of our schools or not, but it may stand as a...