Chapter II: The Course of Study--Educational Values (2)

It is clear that there are other branches of instruction that may lay claim to a place in the course of study in the elementary school; for example, the various branches of natural science, vocal music, manual training, physical culture, drawing, etc.

Here the question of another method of instruction is suggested. There are lessons that require previous preparation by the pupil himself--there are also lessons that may be taken up without such preparation and conducted by the teacher, who leads the exercise and furnishes a large part of the information to be learned, enlisting the aid of members of the class for the purpose of bringing home the new material to their actual experience. Besides these, there are mechanical exercises for purposes of training, such as drawing, penmanship, and calisthenics.

In the first place, there is industrial and æsthetic drawing, which should have a place in all elementary school work. By it is secured the training of the hand and eye. Then, too, drawing helps in all the other branches that require illustration. Moreover, if used in the study of the great works of art in the way hereinbefore mentioned, it helps to cultivate the taste and prepares the future workman for a more useful and lucrative career, inasmuch as superior taste commands higher wages in the finishing of all goods.

Natural science claims a place in the elementary school not so much as a disciplinary study side by side with grammar, arithmetic, and history, as a training in habits of observation and in the use of the technique by which such sciences are expounded. With a knowledge of the technical terms and some training in the methods of original investigation employed in the sciences, the pupil broadens his views of the world and greatly increases his capacity to acquire new knowledge. For the pupil who is unacquainted with the technique of science has to pass without mental profit the numerous scientific allusions and items of information which more and more abound in all our literature, whether of an ephemeral or a permanent character. In an age whose proudest boast is the progress of science in all domains, there should be in the elementary school, from the first, a course in the elements of the sciences. And this is quite possible; for each science possesses some phases that lie very near to the child’s life. These familiar topics furnish the doors through which the child enters the various special departments. Science, it is claimed, is nothing if not systematic. Indeed, science itself may be defined as the interpretation of each fact through all other facts of a kindred nature. Admitting that this is so, it is no less true that pedagogic method begins with the fragmentary knowledge possessed by the pupil and proceeds to organize it and build it out systematically in all directions. Hence any science may be taken up best on the side nearest the experience of the pupil and the investigation continued until the other parts are reached. Thus the pedagogical order is not always the logical or scientific order. In this respect it agrees with the order of discovery, which is usually something quite different from the logical order; for that is the last thing discovered. The natural sciences have two general divisions: one relating to inorganic matter, as physics and chemistry, and one relating to organic, as botany and zoölogy. There should be a spiral course in natural science, commencing each branch with the most interesting phases to the child. A first course should be given in botany, zoölogy, and physics, so as to treat of the structure and uses of familiar plants and animals, and the explanation of physical phenomena as seen in the child’s playthings, domestic machines, etc. A second course, covering the same subjects, but laying more stress on classification and functions, will build on to the knowledge already acquired from the former lessons and from his recently acquired experience. A third course of weekly lessons, conducted by the teacher as before in a conversational style, with experiments and with a comparison of the facts of observation already in the possession of the children, will go far to helping them to an acquisition of the results of natural science. Those of the children specially gifted for observation in some one or more departments of nature will be stimulated and encouraged to make the most of their gifts.

In the opinion of your committee, there should be set apart a full hour each week for drawing and the same amount for oral lessons in natural science.

The oral lessons in history have already been mentioned. The spiral course, found useful in natural science because of the rapid change in capacity of comprehension by the pupil from his sixth to his fourteenth year, will also be best for the history course, which will begin with biographical adventures of interest to the child, and possessing an important historical bearing. These will proceed from the native land first to England, the parent country, and then to the classic civilizations (Greece and Rome being, so to speak, the grandparent countries of the American colonies). These successive courses of oral lessons adapted respectively to the child’s capacity will do much to make the child well informed on this topic. Oral lessons should never be mere lectures, but more like Socratic dialogues, building up a systematic knowledge partly from what is already known, partly by new investigations, and partly by comparison of authorities.

The best argument in favor of weekly oral lessons in natural science and general history is the actual experiences of teachers who have for some time used the plan. It has been found that the lessons in botany, zoölogy, and physics give the pupil much aid in learning his geography, and other lessons relating to nature, while the history lessons assist very much his comprehension of literature, and add interest to geography.

It is understood by your Committee that the lessons in physiology and hygiene (with special reference to the effects of stimulants and narcotics) required by State laws should be included in this oral course in natural science. Manual training, so far as the theory and use of the tools for working in wood and iron are concerned, has just claims on the elementary school for a reason similar to that which admits natural science. From science have proceeded useful inventions for the aid of all manner of manufactures and transportation. The child of to-day lives in a world where machinery is constantly at his hand. A course of training in wood- and iron-work, together with experimental knowledge of physics or natural philosophy, makes it easy for him to learn the management of such machines. Sewing and cookery have not the same, but stronger claims for a place in school. One-half day in each week for one-half a year each in the seventh and eighth grades will suffice for manual training, the sewing and cookery being studied by the girls, and the wood- and iron-work by the boys. It should be mentioned, however, that the advocates of manual training in iron- and wood-work recommend these branches for secondary schools, because of the greater maturity of body, and the less likelihood to acquire wrong habits of manipulation, in the third period of four years of school.

Vocal music has long since obtained a well-established place in all elementary schools. The labors of two generations of special teachers have reduced the steps of instruction to such simplicity that whole classes may make as regular progress in reading music as in reading literature.

In regard to physical culture your Committee is agreed that there should be some form of special daily exercises amounting in the aggregate to one hour each week, the same to include the main features of calisthenics, and German, Swedish, or American systems of physical training, but not to be regarded as a substitute for the old-fashioned recess, established to permit the free exercise of the pupils in the open air. Systematic physical training has for its object rather the will training than recreation, and this must not be forgotten. To go from a hard lesson to a series of calisthenic exercises is to go from one kind of will training to another. Exhaustion of the will should be followed by the caprice and wild freedom of the recess. But systematic physical exercise has its sufficient reason in its aid to a graceful use of the limbs, its development of muscles that are left unused or rudimentary unless called forth by special training, and for the help it gives to the teacher in the way of school discipline.

Your Committee would mention in this connection instruction in morals and manners, which ought to be given in a brief series of lessons each year with a view to build up in the mind a theory of the conventionalities of polite and pure-minded society. If these lessons are made too long or too numerous, they are apt to become offensive to the child’s mind. It is of course understood by your Committee that the substantial moral training of the school is performed by the discipline rather than by the instruction in ethical theory. The child is trained to be regular and punctual, and to restrain his desire to talk and whisper--in these things gaining self-control day by day. The essence of moral behavior is self-control. The school teaches good behavior. The intercourse of a pupil with his fellows without evil words or violent actions is insisted on and secured. The higher moral qualities of truth-telling and sincerity are taught in every class exercise that lays stress on accuracy of statement.

Your Committee has already discussed the importance of teaching something of algebraic processes in the seventh and eighth grades with the view to obtaining better methods of solving problems in advanced arithmetic; a majority of your Committee are of the opinion that formal English grammar should be discontinued in the eighth year, and the study of some foreign language, preferably that of Latin, substituted. The educational effect on an English-speaking pupil of taking up a language which, like Latin, uses inflections instead of prepositions, and which further differs from English by the order in which its words are arranged in the sentence, is quite marked, and a year of Latin places a pupil by a wide interval out of the range of the pupil who has continued English grammar without taking up Latin. But the effect of the year’s study of Latin increases the youth’s power of apperception in very many directions by reason of the fact that so much of the English vocabulary used in technical vocabularies, like those of geography, grammar, history, and literature, is from a Latin source, and besides there are so many traces in the form and substance of human learning of the hundreds of years when Latin was the only tongue in which observation and reflection could be expressed.

Your Committee refers to the programme given later in this report for the details of co-ordinating these several branches already recommended.

_The difference between elementary and secondary studies._

In recommending the introduction of algebraic processes in the seventh and eighth years--as well as in the recommendation just now made to introduce Latin in the eighth year of the elementary course--your Committee has come face to face with the question of the intrinsic difference between elementary and secondary studies.

Custom has placed algebra, geometry, the history of English literature, and Latin in the rank of secondary studies; also general history, physical geography, and the elements of physics and chemistry. In a secondary course of four years trigonometry may be added to the mathematics; some of the sciences whose elements are used in physical geography may be taken up separately in special treatises, as geology, botany, and physiology. There may be also a study of whole works of English authors, as Shakespeare, Milton, and Scott. Greek is also begun in the second or third year of the secondary course. This is the custom in most public high schools. But in private secondary schools Latin is begun earlier, and so, too, Greek, algebra, and geometry. Sometimes geometry is taken up before algebra, as is the custom in German schools. These arrangements are based partly on tradition, partly on the requirements of higher institutions for admission, and partly on the ground that the intrinsic difficulties in these studies have fixed their places in the course of study. Of those who claim that there is an intrinsic reason for the selection and order of these studies, some base their conclusions on experience in conducting pupils through them, others on psychological grounds. The latter contend, for example, that algebra deals with general forms of calculation, while arithmetic deals with the particular instances of calculation. Whatever deals with the particular instance is relatively elementary, whatever deals with the general form is relatively secondary. In the expression a + b = c algebra indicates the form of all addition. This arithmetic cannot do, except in the form of a verbal rule describing the steps of the operation: its examples are all special instances falling under the general form given in algebra. If, therefore, arithmetic is an elementary branch, algebra is relatively to it a secondary branch. So, too, geometry, though not directly based on arithmetic, has to presuppose an acquaintance with it when it reduces spatial functions into numerical forms, as, for example, in the measurement of surfaces and solids, and in ascertaining the ratio of the circumference to the radius, and of the hypothenuse to the two other sides of the right-angled triangle. Geometry, moreover, deals with necessary relations; its demonstrations reach universal and necessary conclusions, holding good not merely in such material shapes as we have met with in actual experience, but with all examples possible, past, present, or future. Such knowledge transcending experience is intrinsically secondary as compared with the first acquaintance with geometric shapes in concrete examples.

In the case of geometry it is claimed by some that what is called “inventional geometry” may be properly introduced into the elementary grades. By this some mean the practice with blocks in the shape of geometric solids, and the construction of different figures from the same; others mean the rediscovery by the pupil for himself of the necessary relations demonstrated by Euclid. The former--exercises of construction with blocks--are well enough in the kindergarten, where they assist in learning number, as well as in the analysis of material forms. But its educational value is small for pupils advanced into the use of books. The original discovery of Euclid’s demonstrations, on the other hand, belongs more properly to higher education than to elementary. In the geometrical text-books, recently introduced into secondary schools, there is so much of original demonstration required that the teacher is greatly embarrassed on account of the differences in native capacity for mathematics that develop among the pupils of the same class in solving the problems of invention. A few gifted pupils delight in the inventions, and develop rapidly in power, while the majority of the class use too much time over them, and thus rob the other branches of the course of study, or else fall into the bad practice of getting help from others in the preparation of their lessons. A few in every class fall hopelessly behind and are discouraged. The result is an attempt on the part of the teacher to correct the evil by requiring a more thorough training in the mathematical studies preceding, and the consequent delay of secondary pupils in the lower grades of the course in order to bring up their “inventional geometry.” Many, discouraged, fail to go on; many more fail to reach higher studies because unable to get over the barrier unnecessarily placed before them by teachers who desire that no pupils except natural geometricians shall enter into higher studies.

Physical geography in its scientific form is very properly made a part of the secondary course of study. The pupil in his ninth year of work can profitably acquire the scientific technique of geology, botany, zoölogy, meteorology, and ethnology, and in the following years take up those sciences separately and push them further, using the method of actual investigation. The subject-matter of physical geography is of very high interest to the pupil who has studied geography in the elementary grades after an approved method. It takes up the proximate grounds and causes for the elements of difference on the earth’s surface, already become familiar to him through his elementary studies, and pushes them back into deeper, simpler, and more satisfactory principles. This study performs the work also of correlating the sciences that relate to organic nature by showing their respective uses to man. From the glimpses which the pupil gets of mineralogy, geology, botany, zoölogy, ethnology, and meteorology in their necessary connection as geographic conditions he sees the scope and grand significance of those separate inquiries. A thirst is aroused in him to pursue his researches into their domains. He sees, too, the borderlands in which new discoveries may be made by the enterprising explorer.

Physics, including what was called until recently “natural philosophy,” after Newton’s _Principia_ (_Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica_), implies more knowledge of mathematics for its thorough discussion than the secondary pupil is likely to possess. In fact, the study of this branch in college thirty years ago was crippled by the same cause. It should follow the completion of analytical geometry. Notwithstanding this, a very profitable study of this subject may be made in the second year of the high school or preparatory school, although the formulas can then be understood in so far as they imply elementary algebra only. The pupil does not get the most exact notions of the quantitative laws that rule matter in its states of motion and equilibrium, but he does see the action of forces as qualitative elements of phenomena, and understand quite well the mechanical inventions by which men subdue them for his use and safety. Even in the elementary grades the pupil can seize very many of these qualitative aspects and learn the explanation of the mechanical phenomena of nature, and other applications of the same principles in invention, as, for example, gravitation in falling bodies: its measurement by the scales; the part it plays in the pump, the barometer, the pendulum; cohesion in mud, clay, glue, paste, mortar, cement, etc.; capillary attraction in lamp-wicks, sponges, sugar, the sap in plants; the applications of lifting by the lever, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw; heat in the sun, combustion, friction, steam, thermometer, conduction, clothing, cooking, etc.; the phenomena of light, electricity, magnetism, and the explanation of such mechanical devices as spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, prisms, photographic cameras, electric tension in bodies, lightning, mariner’s compass, horseshoe magnet, the telegraph, the dynamo. This partially qualitative study of forces and mechanical inventions has the educational effect of enlightening the pupil, and emancipating him from the network of superstition that surrounds him in the child world, partly of necessity and partly by reason of the illiterate adults that he sometimes meets with in the persons of nurses, servants, and tradespeople, whose occupations have more attraction for him than those of cultured people. The fairy world is a world of magic, of immediate interventions of supernatural spiritual beings, and while this is proper enough for the child up to the time of the school, and in a lessening degree for some time after, it is only negative and harmful in adult manhood and womanhood. It produces arrested development of powers of observation and reflection in reference to phenomena, and stops the growth of the soul at the infantine stage of development. Neither is this infantine stage of wonder and magic more religious than the stage of disillusion through the study of mathematics and physics. It is the arrest of religious development, also, at the stage of fetichism. The highest religion, that of pure Christianity, sees in the world infinite mediations, all for the purpose of developing independent individuality; the perfection of human souls not only in one kind of piety, namely, that of the heart, but in the piety of the intellect that beholds truth, the piety of the will that does good deeds wisely, the piety of the senses that sees the beautiful and realizes it in works of art. This is the Christian idea of divine Providence as contrasted with the heathen idea of that Providence, and the study of natural philosophy is an essential educational requisite in its attainment, although a negative means. Of course there is danger of replacing the spiritual idea of the divine by the dynamical or mechanical idea, and thus arresting the mind at the stage of pantheism instead of fetichism. But this danger can be avoided by further education through secondary into higher education, whose entire spirit and method are comparative and philosophical in the best sense of the term. For higher education seems to have as its province the correlation of the several branches of human learning in the unity of the spiritual view furnished by religion to our civilization. By it one learns to see each branch, each science or art or discipline, in the light of all the others. This higher or comparative view is essential to any completeness of education, for it alone prevents the one-sidedness of hobbies, or “fads,” as they are called in the slang of the day. It prevents also the bad effects that flow from the influence of what are termed “self-educated men,” who for the most part carry up with them elementary methods of study, or at best, secondary methods, which accentuate the facts and relations of natural and spiritual phenomena, but do not deal with their higher correlations. The comparative method cannot, in fact, be well introduced until the student is somewhat advanced, and has already completed his elementary course of study dealing with the immediate aspects of the world, and his secondary course dealing with the separate formal and dynamical aspects that lie next in order behind the facts of first observation. Higher education in a measure unifies these separate formal and dynamic aspects, corrects their one-sidedness, and prevents the danger of what is so often noted in the self-educated men who unduly exaggerate some one of the subordinate aspects of the world and make it a sort of first principle.

Here your Committee finds in its way the question of the use of the full scientific method in the teaching of science in the elementary school. The true method has been called the method of investigation, but that method as used by the child is only a sad caricature of the method used by the mature scientific man, who has long since passed through the fragmentary observation and reflection that prevail in the period of childhood, as well as the tendencies to exaggeration of the importance of one or another branch of knowledge at the expense of the higher unity that correlates all; an exaggeration that manifests itself in the possession and use of a hobby. The ideal scientific man has freed himself from obstacles of this kind, whether psychological or objective. What astronomical observers call the subjective coefficient must be ascertained and eliminated from the record that shows beginnings, endings, and rates. There is a possibility of perfect specialization in a scientific observer only after the elementary and secondary attitudes of mind have been outgrown. An attempt to force the child into the full scientific method by specialization would cause an arrest of his development in the other branches of human learning outside of his specialty. He could not properly inventory the data of his own special sphere unless he knew how to recognize the defining limits or boundaries that separate his province from its neighbors. The early days of science abounded in examples of confusion of provinces in the inventories of their data. It is difficult, even now, to decide where physics and chemistry leave off, and biology begins.

Your Committee does not attempt to state the exact proportion in which the child, at his various degrees of advancement, may be able to dispense with the guiding influence of teacher and text-book in his investigations, but they protest strongly against the illusion under which certain zealous advocates of the early introduction of scientific method seem to labor. They ignore in their zeal the deduction that is to be made for the guiding hand of the teacher, who silently furnishes to the child the experience that he lacks, and quietly directs his special attention to this or to that phase, and prevents him from hasty or false generalization as well as from undue exaggeration of single facts or principles. Here the teacher adds the needed scientific outlook which the child lacks, but which the mature scientist possesses for himself.

It is contended by some that the scientific frame of mind is adapted only to science, but not to art, literature, and religion, which have something essential that science does not reach; not because of the incompleteness of the sciences themselves, but because of the attitude of the mind assumed in the observation of nature. In analytic investigation there is isolation of parts one from another, with a view to find the sources of the influences which produce the phenomena shown in the object. The mind brings everything to the test of this idea. Every phenomenon that exists comes from beyond itself, and analysis will be able to trace the source.

Now, this frame of mind, which insists on a foreign origin of all that goes to constitute an object, debars itself in advance from the province of religion, art, and literature as well as of philosophy. For self-determination, personal activity, is the first principle assumed by religion, and it is tacitly assumed by art and literature, Classic and Christian. The very definition of philosophy implies this, for it is the attempt to explain the world by the assumption of a first principle, and to show that all classes of objects imply that principle as ultimate presupposition. According to this view it is important not to attempt to hasten the use of a strictly scientific method on the part of the child. In his first years he is acquiring the results of civilization rather as an outfit of habits, usages, and traditions than as a scientific discovery. He cannot be expected to stand over against the culture of his time, and challenge one and all of its conventionalities to justify themselves before his reason. His reason is too weak. He is rather in the imitation stage of mind than in that of criticism. He will not reach the comparative or critical method until the era of higher education.

However this may be, it is clear that the educational value of science and its method is a very important question, and that on it depends the settlement of the question where specialization may begin. To commence the use of the real scientific method would imply a radical change also in methods from the beginning. This may be realized by considering the hold which even the kindergarten retains upon symbolism and upon art and literature. But in the opinion of a majority of your Committee natural science itself should be approached, in the earliest years of the elementary school, rather in the form of results with glimpses into the methods by which these results were reached. In the last two years (the seventh and eighth) there may be some strictness of scientific form and an exhibition of the method of discovery. The pupil, too, may to some extent put this method in practice himself. In the secondary school there should be some laboratory work. But the pupil cannot be expected to acquire for himself fully the scientific method of dealing with nature until the second part of higher education--its post-graduate work. Nevertheless this good should be kept in view from the first year of the elementary school, and there should be a gradual and continual approach to it.

In the study of general history appears another branch of the secondary course. History of the native land is assumed to be an elementary study. History of the world is certainly a step further away from the experience of the child. It is held by some teachers to be in accordance with proper method to begin with the foreign relations of one’s native land and to work outward to the world-history. The European relations involved in the discovery and colonization of America furnish the only explanation to a multitude of questions that the pupil has started in the elementary school. He should move outward from what he has already learned, by the study of a new concentric circle of grounds and reasons, according to this view. This, however, is not the usual course taken. On beginning secondary history the pupil is set back face to face with the period of tradition, just when historic traces first make their appearance. He is, by this arrangement, broken off from the part of history that he has become acquainted with, and made to grapple with that period which has no relation to his previous investigations. It is to be said, however, that general history lays stress on the religious thread of connection, though less now than formerly. The world history is a conception of the great Christian thinker, St. Augustine, who held that the world and its history is a sort of antiphonic hymn, in which God reads his counsels, and the earth and man read the responses. He induced Orosius, his pupil, to sketch a general history in the spirit of his view. It was natural that the Old Testament histories, and especially the chapters of Genesis, should furnish the most striking part of its contents. This general history was connected with religion, and brought closer to the experience of the individual than the history of his own people. To commence history with the Garden of Eden, the Fall of Man, and the Noachian Deluge was to begin with what was most familiar to all minds, and most instructive, because it concerned most nearly the conduct of life. Thus religion furnished the apperceptive material by which the early portions of history were recognized, classified, and made a part of experience.

Now that studies in archæology, especially those in the Nile and Euphrates valleys, are changing the chronologies and the records of early times and adding new records of the past, bringing to light national movements and collisions of peoples, together with data by which to determine the status of their industrial civilization, their religious ideas, and the form of their literature and art, the concentric arrangement of all this material around the history of the chosen people as a nucleus is no longer possible. The question has arisen, therefore, whether general history should not be rearranged for the secondary school, and made to connect with American history for apperceptive material rather than with Old Testament history. To this it has been replied with force that the idea of a world history, as St. Augustine conceived it, is the noblest educative ideal ever connected with the subject of history. Future versions of general history will not desert this standpoint, we are told, even if they take as their basis that of ethnology and anthropology, for these, too, will exhibit a plan in human history--an educative principle that leads nations toward freedom and science, because the Creator of nature has made it, in its fundamental constitution, an evolution or progressive development of individuality. Thus the idea of divine Providence is retained, though made more comprehensive by bringing the whole content of natural laws within his will as his method of work.

These considerations, we are reminded by the partisans of humanity studies, point back to the educative value of history as corrective of the one-sidedness of the method of science. Science seeks explanation in the mechanical conditions of, and impulses received from, the environment, while history keeps its gaze fixed on human purposes, and studies the genesis of national actions through the previous stages of feelings, convictions, and conscious ideas. In history the pupil has for his object self-activity, reaction against environment, instead of mechanism, or activity through another.

The history of English literature is another study of the secondary school. It is very properly placed beyond the elementary school, for as taught it consists largely of the biographies of men of letters. The pupils who have not yet learned any great work of literature should not be pestered with literary biography, for at that stage the greatness of the men of letters cannot be seen. Plutarch makes great biographies because he shows heroic struggles and great deeds. The heroism of artists and poets consists in sacrificing all for the sake of their creations. The majority of them come off sadly at the hands of the biographer, for the reason that the very sides of their lives are described which they had slighted and neglected for the sake of the Muses. The prophets of Israel did not live in city palaces, but in caves; they did not wear fine raiment, nor feed sumptuously, nor conform to the codes of polite society. They were no courtiers when they approached the king. They neglected all the other institutions--family, productive industry, and state--for the sake of one, the Church, and even that not the established ceremonial of the people, but a higher and more direct communing with Jehovah. So with artists and men of letters, it is more or less the case, that the institutional side of their lives is neglected, or unsymmetrical, or if this is not the case, it will be found prosaic and uneventful, throwing no light on their matchless productions.

For these reasons, should not the present use of literary biography as it exists in secondary schools, and is gradually making its way into elementary schools, be discouraged, and the time now given to it devoted to the study of literary works of art? It will be admitted that the exposure of the foibles of artists has an immoral tendency on youth: for example, one affects to be a poet, and justifies laxity and self-indulgence through the example of Byron. Those who support this view hold that we should not dignify the immoral and defective side of life by making it a branch of study in school.

_Correlation by synthesis of studies._

Your Committee would mention another sense in which the expression correlation of studies is sometimes used. It is held by advocates of an artificial centre of the course of study. They use, for example, De Foe’s Robinson Crusoe for a reading exercise, and connect with it the lessons in geography and arithmetic. It has been pointed out by critics of this method that there is always danger of covering up the literary features of the reading matter under accessories of mathematics and natural science. If the material for other branches is to be sought for in connection with the literary exercise, it will distract the attention from the poetic unity. On the other hand, arithmetic and geography cannot be unfolded freely and comprehensively if they are to wait on the opportunities afforded in a poem or novel for their development. A correlation of this kind, instead of being a deeper correlation, such as is found in all parts of human learning by the studies of the college and university, is rather a shallow and uninteresting kind of correlation, that reminds one of the system of mnemonics, or artificial memory, which neglects the association of facts and events with their causes and the history of their evolution, and looks for unessential quips, puns, or accidental suggestions with a view to strengthening the memory. The effect of this is to weaken the power of systematic thinking which deals with essential relations, and substitute for it a chaotic memory that ties together things through false and seeming relations, not of the things and events, but of the words that denote them.

The correlation of geography and arithmetic and history in and through the unity of a work of fiction is at best an artificial correlation, which will stand in the way of the true objective correlation. It is a temporary scaffolding made for school purposes. Instruction should avoid such temporary structures as much as possible, and when used they should be only used for the day, and not for the year, because of the danger of building up an apperceptive centre in the child’s mind that will not harmonize with the true apperceptive centre required by the civilization. The story of Robinson Crusoe has intense interest to the child as a lesson in sociology, showing him the helplessness of isolated man and the re-enforcement that comes to him through society. It shows the importance of the division of labor. All children should read this book in the later years of the elementary course, and a few profitable discussions may be had in school regarding its significance. But De Foe painted in it only the side of adventure that he found in his countrymen in his epoch, England after the defeat of the Armada having taken up a career of conquest on the seas, ending by colonization and a world commerce. The liking for adventure continues to this day among all Anglo-Saxon peoples, and beyond other nationalities there is in English-speaking populations a delight in building up civilization from the very foundation. This is only, however, one phase of the Anglo-Saxon mind. Consequently the history of Crusoe is not a proper centre for a year’s study in school. It omits cities, governments, the world commerce, the international process, the Church, the newspaper and book from view, and they are not even reflected in it.

Your Committee would call attention in this connection to the importance of the pedagogical principle of analysis and isolation as preceding synthesis and correlation. There should be rigid isolation of the elements of each branch for the purpose of getting a clear conception of what is individual and peculiar in a special province of learning. Otherwise one will not gain from each its special contribution to the whole. That there is some danger from the kind of correlation that essays to teach all branches in each will be apparent from this point of view.