What the Schools Teach and Might Teach | Page 3

only. It too had to be taught, and it offered a
second task for the schools. In the early schools this teaching of the
so-called Three R's was all that was needed, because these were the
only adult activities that had become so complicated as to require
systematized teaching. Other things were still simple enough, so that
young people could enter into them sufficiently for all necessary
education.
As community vision widened and men's affairs came to extend far

beyond the horizon, a need arose for knowledge of the outlying world.
This knowledge could rarely be obtained sufficiently through travel and
observation. There arose the new need for the systematic teaching of
geography. What had hitherto not been a human necessity and therefore
not an educational essential became both because of changed social
conditions.
Looking at education from this social point of view it is easy to see that
there was a time when no particular need existed for history, drawing,
science, vocational studies, civics, etc., beyond what one could acquire
by mingling with one's associates in the community. These were
therefore not then essentials for education. It is just as easy to see that
changed social conditions of the present make necessary for every one
a fuller and more systematic range of ideas in each of these fields than
one can pick up incidentally. These things have thereby become
educational essentials. Whether a thing today is an educational
"essential" or not seems to depend upon two things: whether it is a
human necessity today; and whether it is so complex or inaccessible as
to require systematic teaching. The number of "essentials" changes
from generation to generation. Those today who proclaim the Three R's
as the sole "essentials" appear to be calling from out the rather distant
past. Many things have since become essential; and other things are
being added year by year. The normal method of education in things
not yet put into the schools, is participation in those things. One gets
his ideas from watching others and then learns to do by doing. There is
no reason to believe that as the school lends its help to some of the
more difficult things, this normal plan of learning can be set aside and
another substituted. Of course the schools must take in hand the
difficult portions of the process. Where complicated knowledge is
needed, the schools must teach that knowledge. Where drill is required,
they must give the drill. But the knowledge and the drill should be
given in their relation to the human activities in which they are used.
As the school helps young people to take on the nature of adulthood, it
will still do so by helping them to enter adequately into the activities of
adulthood. Youth will learn to think, to judge, and to do, by thinking,
judging, and doing. They will acquire a sense of responsibility by
bearing responsibility. They will take on serious forms of thought by
doing the serious things which require serious thought.

It cannot be urged that young people have a life of their own which is
to be lived only for youth's sake and without reference to the adult
world about them. As a matter of fact children and youth are a part of
the total community of which the mature adults are the natural and
responsible leaders. At an early age they begin to perform adult
activities, to take on adult points of view, to bear adult responsibilities.
Naturally it is done in ways appropriate to their natures. At first it is
imitative play, constructive play, etc.--nature's method of bringing
children to observe the serious world about them, and to gird
themselves for entering into it. The next stage, if normal opportunities
are provided, is playful participation in the activities of their elders.
This changes gradually into serious participation as they grow older,
becoming at the end of the process responsible adult action. It is not
possible to determine the educational materials and processes at any
stage of growth without looking at the same time to that entire world of
which youth forms a part, and in which the nature and abilities of their
elders point the goal of their training.
The social point of view herein expressed is sometimes characterized as
being utilitarian. It may be so; but not in any narrow or undesirable
sense. It demands that training be as wide as life itself. It looks to
human activities of every type: religious activities; civic activities; the
duties of one's calling; one's family duties; one's recreations; one's
reading and meditation; and the rest of the things that are done by the
complete man or woman.

READING AND LITERATURE
The amount of time given to reading in the elementary schools of
Cleveland, and the average time in