PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS

THE LOCK-STEP IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS1

RICHARD G. BOONE, EDITOR OF “EDUCATION," BOSTON, MASS.

1. Some grouping of pupils for class work is essential to the organization of a school. This proposition implies that a school is more than a number of individuals working at learning, in one place. In a school, as in any other society, there is necessary co-operation, and mutual reactions, and forbearance, and conventional prohibitions and privileges, and the give-and-take that goes along with any congregate life. To constitute a school, these individuals must submit, as elsewhere in social groups, to more or less subordination to others, and to mutual reinforcement. This also is a wholesome lesson. Real preparation for adult life requires some such preparatory training. The term "school" implies organization, a recognition of and planning for some common good. In certain affairs the several children are considered as a whole, the individuals organically related in a larger unit. Equally also, the proposition implies that certain work of this school may be conducted as class work; i. e., a smaller or larger number of the individuals may be dealt with as one group. This is done in games, in singing, in floor or openair exercises for physical training, in a common program for school attendance, in hearing or telling the same stories, in the assignment of a definite number of children to each teacher, in directions concerning deportment and moving about the house, and, generally, in more or less. uniform rules concerning behavior.

The conservative teacher may well ask: If children may be safely grouped for all or a part of these requirements, why not for the more narrowly academic lessons? Are children less unlike in these matters than in their understanding of history, the forces and phenomena of nature, the formal lessons of reading, and the relations of number?

I conclude that much of the work of the school, in any grade, may be well done with children taken in groups, and that only so can the school do its legitimate service, and the child receive the training its future demands.

2. But this grouping must be determined, manifestly, by the needs of the pupils, not the conveniences of the teacher. I think it is not unfair to say that most of the arguments for close grading, or for any fixed. classification for a considerable period, for holding pupils together because they have once been put together, and requiring of all the same lessons, The Lock-Step in Education" by Superintendent William J. Shearer, of Elizabeth, N. J., was sent to the author for necessary abridgment and was not returned in time. [EDITOR.]

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take their meaning from the conveniences of the system in administration. It is easier for the teacher to keep track of the children; it simplifies the work of examination and teaching; it makes class work possible; fewer teachers are needed for the same number of pupils; the teacher has fewer lessons to prepare; such mass work shows to better advantage-these are some of the pleas made. It must be apparent that none of these are valid reasons for any classification, certainly not the determining conditions. What the individual child can do with any assignment, and what the effort will do for him, should decide the matter. Lack of funds, lack of teachers, or adverse public sentiment, may make another course expedient; but we should not make the mistake of thinking that these are ideal conditions. In any classification those pupils are placed in the same group who can work together, for more or less of their assignment, to advantage, the connection for any individual pupil, or any number of them, being held so loosely as to allow of change, when change is a benefit to them.

3. This suggests a third statement: that any grouping must obviously be subject to frequent readjustments. If a child has mastered books so as to be able to use them for his own purposes, and expression fairly adequate to his experience, and has acquired or native alertness suited to his years, there is almost no sequence of lessons or production that may not safely be exchanged for some other series, not only with no harm to the child, but often with actual profit. Teachers - often successful teachers, sometimes very superior teachers-work upon the assumption that the purpose of the school is to fix and communicate set lessons; whereas it would seem rather to be to cultivate, by some exercise or other, preferably of the child's own setting, certain habits of mind, and worthy interests, and personal initiative, indifferent as to the particular lesson learned.

4. "Promotion" is a much misused term. Primarily it means advancement, a going or sending forward. In the school it goes on constantly, as pupils make daily advances in their work and grow in maturity. Growing in power to correspond with the increasing difficulties of arithmetic, or earth-knowledge, or the literary meanings of the reading lessons, or the complexities of nature, is the essence of promotion. The child is promoted whenever he takes up, with others or alone, a new and subsequent phase of the old subject. Promotion is a constant process. It has come to mean, technically, the separation of the strong from the less advanced, and periodically putting the former forward into what is characterized as a new stage of learning. As a matter of fact, there is no more marked difference in either the difficulty or the quality of the work between the fifth and sixth grades in most schools than between certain stages of any important subject within either grade.

We make much of the arbitrary division of elementary instruction into years or half-years, as if there were some virtue in spreading a certain

amount of lesson matter over just so much time, or in holding all the members of a class the same number of days on the same number of exercises. Superficially it does seem to be convenient to chop up the elementary course into eight steps to equal the eight years which tradition has fixed as essential for this work. Without doubt some children will acquire more maturity, and experience, and resourcefulness, and initiative. in six years than others will in eight. Some may require nine years. And it is obviously well-furnished maturity and power to use one's experience that is purposed by the school, not an arbitrarily fixed time. in getting them.

5. So that, if "promotion" be taken in the current sense as meaning the periodical advancement of some and the withholding of others, it should come to a child, not merely when he has completed the assignments to his group, nor when he can probably keep along with the next higher class in their more difficult exercises, but whenever the effort to do the work of the more advanced group will be more profitable to him personally than that of the lower class.

Ordinarily he will have fairly mastered the requirements of one grade before he would be benefited by being transferred to another. Ordinarily the assurance that he could and would do satisfactory work in a higher class would be a factor in suggesting his promotion; but the answers to these questions, whether affirmative or negative, cannot be taken as final in determining his classification or reclassification. The effect or influence of the work upon the pupil, as incentive, or mental furnishing, or self-reliance, or quality of interest-not his learning of so many lessons, or acquisition of so much knowledge, or attendance at school so many days-must be taken as vital.

This is not a plea for pushing the child on thru the grades. It is not meant as an encouragement of hothouse methods. It is simply intended to urge that children be placed as individuals where their individual needs will best be met; in higher or lower classes, with only incidental reference to whether a given assignment has been finished. Of course, the answer is made that such a procedure would destroy the organization; it would make class work impossible; it would make ragged and unattractive recitations. But the school does not exist for the organization, for the class, for the recitation, but for the individual pupil.

6. The viciousness of the current system of examinations and promotions lies in the fact that they rest upon the measuring of one pupil by another by a more or less arbitrary standard; while, in the process of education, simple justice would seem to require that each be measured by himself his attainments and maturity at a given time compared with those of a former date.

It will be objected that when the boy leaves school and begins his adult service in business or profession, he will be judged by what he can

do as compared with others. But this non-school life exists not primarily for education, tho it is incidentally educative, but for other purposes, economic and human. It is a primary principle of life, and must be more true of the immature than of men and women, that each may be fairly judged only "according to that he hath, not according to that he hath not," tho someone else have it. The child particularly, in conduct, understanding, personal biases, and constitutional temperament, has a right to treatment as a distinct individual, and to have his actions and purposes measured by the standard of his possibilities, not by what may be possible or easy for someone else. Both abstractly and as a means of education, what is good for one child may be poor for another. On a scale of 100, a rapidly growing, improving child may show poor marks, and the brilliant boy of fine answers be mentally loitering. No examination is worth much that does not reveal the conditions and character of

his growth, just as if he were the only member of his class.

7. Other vicious conditions result from the prevalent notion that all children of the same grade in different rooms, or in the same room, must learn the same lessons and be judged by the same exercises and products.

All the children of any group may reasonably be required, while they are kept in the same group, to do work of practically the same grade of difficulty; but not necessarily the same assignments. To many teachers this seems to be a "hard saying." Better the "lock-step." Children of the same "grade" are very much alike; the same lessons can be used for all, and with profit to all. It conserves the class; if one is held back a little, it will not hurt him; and if another is urged to keep pace with the stronger ones, he probably needs the stimulus. So it is argued. But the argument, again, is altogether from the side of convenience to the teacher or respect for the organization. We easily forget that the child's particular need should determine the matter. Besides, in every recitation (if there must be formal recitations) the specific contribution of each from his own point of view greatly enriches the experience of all. Less and less is a course of study regarded as a prescription to be filled, or an inventory to be memorized, or an exclusive series of tasks to be done. Rather a course of study is a suggestive grading of material suitable for educational purposes, with many exercises for each stage or grade, any or several or all of which may be used as individual conditions may require. All the children of any group may reasonably be held, while they remain members of the same group, to do work of the same grade of difficulty, but not necessarily the same assignments.

8. It is what the pupil is able to do, and tries to do, and does do with his knowledge as the work progresses, not what he remembers of it upon a set occasion, that must stand to the teacher as a mark of his progress and of his fitness for advancement from his group. The reproducing of knowledge does not necessarily carry along with it the power or

the disposition to use it; nor does a discrimination of truth insure truthtelling; nor does acquaintance with the forms of conventional courtesy guarantee considerateness. Knowledge and feeling and purpose worked into life-behavior cannot be tested by the traditional examination, under whatever name it may go. Besides, the examination, as properly known and used, is meaningless unless there be behind it some form or degree of the lock-step martinetism. This is in no sense a condemnation of the legitimate tests imposed upon each child to determine what he knows and what he can do with it; what he likes and with what sincerity; what are his plans, and how he is adjusting the means at his command for their realization.

9. Finally, let it be summarized: Some grouping of pupils is essential to the organization of the school as a school; but as all acquisition and maturing are individual processes, the work of the school is good to the degree that it habitually takes the individual into account in its several exercises.

NATURE STUDY TRUE TO LIFE

C. F. HODGE, CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER, MASS.

Life on one side, nature on the other. Life, as we know it, impossible without nature to support it; nature, meaningless without life to interpret it. The bond of harmony or adjustment between life and natureknowledge. Nature is poweful, overflowing with resource, and true to the core; life must play true to the nature in which it exists, for to play false means failure and invites the penalty of death. These conceptions are imbedded in the very foundations of human thought, as evidenced by the words used to express them. The Greek word ẞíos - from which we derive "biology," the science of life-denoted a player true to the life. The Aryan roots can, "to be able," and ken, "to know," kennen and können—are the same in origin.

In truth, so fundamental is this relation between life and nature that our best definition of life itself-given us as long ago as Aristotle and in modern form by Brooks-is simply this: "Life is response to the order of nature;" and since, as Brooks follows out the thought, the essential element is the knowledge of how to respond in such wise as to preserve life, he is enabled to say: "Life is that which, when joined to mind, is knowledge-knowledge in use." Life is knowledge in use. To know is to live; to ken is to can.

These ideas, it seems to me, are the bed-rock of every true philosophy of education and of every true philosophy of life. I think we shall find that every animal which educates its young ones at all—except some men -educates them on this basis. All the plays of young animals with one