Present School Methods. System of Today Compared with that of Past Years.

Année
1900
Mois
9
Jour
15
Titre de l'article
Present School Methods. System of Today Compared with that of Past Years.
Auteur
----
Page(s)
1
Type d'article
Langue
Contenu de l'article
PRESENT SCHOOL METHODS. SYSTEM OF TODAY COMPARED WITH THAT OF PAST YEARS Children of These Times Receive Much Instruction that is of Questionable Value – Are We to have a Generation of Ninnies and Incompetents Last week, while fulfilling a duty of courtesy towards certain friends of ours who were strangers to this city, we had occasion to examine the latest methods of teaching and the most recent improvements in school appointments. When we say latest in these instances, we limit our meaning to the advances of which St. John can boast in the matter of schooling children. Other cities, particularly American cities, are doubtless ahead of us in the adoption of the most up-to-date ideas of school-furniture and in the prescribing of the newest methods of teaching. What we mean, however, is that our duty led us to examine all that St. John could offer, most modern and most advanced in the line of school- houses, with their furnishings and appointments, and incidentally the latest modes of imparting instruction to children. All this we certainly saw, or enough of it, at least, to serve us as a text for an article on schools and school-children. In the first place, then, we were highly pleased with the great advance made in school appointments, with special attention to hygiene, as shown in the new High School and the still more modern building at Indian town known as the Alexandra School. In both these buildings one can study the latest devices for ventilation, beating, and sanitation, the best plans for distribution and size of class-rooms, and even for the best disposition of hats and coats. Both schools are object-lessons of the rare which is being taken of the physical comfort and health of our youth. So empathetic are the evidences of this public solicitude for the health of children, and so copious and unstinted are the precautions taken to secure complete immunity from disease, that we realized personally how much we were losing by being born so many years ago. We should like to be a child again, in order to feel the comforting sensation of being so cared for and generally of being an object of such lavish solicitude to so many people. It was our misfortune, however, to pass our own tender youth at a time when there was not such a premium on hygenic furnishings and appointments in the schools of New Brunswick. And so we can only envy the children of today the comfort which they must have in such a building as the new High School, and bless heaven that they are so well treated. We are not so decided, however, in our approval of the latest methods of teaching. While we may have a floating suspicion that the school-boy of today is coddled and pampered to an extent to make him a valetudinarian through the perfection of ventilation, salutation, and improved hat-rooms. We are very decidedly of the belief that certain new-fangled theories of education followed in our schools can but have the effect of depriving him of his power of personal effort and even of retarding the development of his intelligence. There is entirely too much spoon-feeding. The system of education which begins by regarding the alphabet as a very advanced branch of knowledge, not to be attempted until the child has followed an elaborate series of object lessons in toys and educational games, does not recommend itself to one who believes that the highway to knowledge can be followed only with real effort. Preparatory to the awful terrors which the alphabet has now-a-days to the fin de siecle child, a series of lessons in calisthenics, or light physical exercises is given him. He is made to move his arms, first in one direction and then in another; he expands his infantile chest and holds his tiny breath while the teacher counts the seconds: and then he beats time with little feet, being careful all the while to keep his eyes front and his feet pointing forward. He is then at liberty to take his seat and make skeleton men on his slate. Each figure is a humpty-dumpty of course, the original of which was first copied from the picture writing of our aborigines. Doubtless this is good amusement for the children, and the familiarity which they thus acquire with the figures of wild Indians lessens the terrors of the approaching alphabet. There is yet another system which is even still more solicitous not to overtax the childish brain. This system begins by placing the child on the same level with the larva of insects. As an instance of the new theory, children must first crawl on the floor pretending they are caterpillars; then they may get up and flap their hands because they have become butterflies. That is insect life and for the time being they are insects. They model in clay in order that they may learn that a dog has four feet and a tail; they build houses with bricks that they may learn to carry out design; and they are taught to hop like frogs in order to be able to feel what it is to be a frog. All this time it would be a crime to place the alphabet before them, and a heinous offence against childhood to expect them to learn to read. While no observation of ours could justify us in charging that this womanish system of spoon-feeding is practised to any marked extent in our schools, it is undeniable that there is a tendency to it, with a corresponding dimunition of healthy personal effort on the part of the child. Actually we believe that the alphabet as such is no longer taught in our schools. We are not going to stake our veracity on this assertion, but we do believe that, if it is taught at all, the teaching of it is preceded by an humble apology from the teacher for the inconvenience put upon the child in having to learn it. It is a great mistake on the part of a teacher, or a system of teaching, to believe that education is an amusement. To learn is a deliberate and conscious effort of the will and memory; and to make the effort is not an easy or a comfortable process. We might say that there can be no learning without tears—but tears in the school- room are now archane or absolescent. In other years if children liked what they had to do in the process of acquiring knowledge, so much the better; if they did not, they were made to do it all the same. When noses had to be kept to the grindstone, they were kept there; and children shed tears enough to fill many buckets without exciting in the minds of good teachers even the suspicion of a thought of undue or unnecessary cruelty. We fear that name of our present methods of education are childish and weak, fitted only to produce ninnies and moral valetundinarians. There is altogether too much theorising about our school methods— too much experimenting with fads. If parents wish their children to grow into self-reliant men and women, they must see that honest effort be exacted of them in youth.