Читать книгу Introduction to the scientific study of education - Charles Hubbard Judd - Страница 23

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It is a striking fact that all this borrowing had to do with the common school. Nor was it inappropriate at that period that emphasis should be on the school for the common people. In the young states there was relatively little higher education, and the need was great for an improvement of the common schools.

The consequences of this borrowing were momentous for our history. There are two characteristics which our American schools of elementary grade took on in imitation of the German model, which characteristics have determined in large measure their subsequent development down to the present. In the first place, the German common school was strictly a vernacular school, and, in the second place, it dealt only with rudimentary subjects. The Gymnasium, or the school for the aristocracy, was not a vernacular school. Latin and Greek and modern foreign languages were taught in even the lower grades of the Gymnasium. Furthermore, the Gymnasium alone taught such “higher” subjects as the higher mathematics, while the common school confined itself exclusively to arithmetic as the rudimentary branch of mathematics. In point of time the German Volksschule, as noted above, conducted a course eight years in length. The pupils completed this course at fourteen years of age, when they were confirmed in the Church.

The common school was the institution which America borrowed in 1830-1840. The common school was set up in the United States as an eight-year school devoted exclusively to the vernacular and to rudimentary subjects. But the American system developed. The length of the school year increased, and the number of pupils who are ambitious to go on into the higher schools has enormously increased. In 1917 we were told by the Commissioner of Education of the United States that more than 1,300,000 of the young people in this country were in the high schools. Even now, however, the eight-year vernacular rudimentary school of Germany has its stamp on our American life. As a rule our American schools do not permit a pupil to study foreign languages in the lower school, even when we know that he is going on to high school. The general exclusion of languages is due to the tradition that the elementary school is a vernacular school, not to inability on the part of pupils to learn languages. We will not permit algebra to be taught in the elementary school, because algebra is not a rudimentary subject. To be sure, we have had a hard time trying to keep arithmetic in its position of exclusive domination of the elementary course. We have grafted into the arithmetic all kinds of economic information about insurance and banks and foreign exchange. We have exercised our ingenuity to the limit in inventing examples of a complicated sort in order to keep the pupils in the upper grades at work in arithmetic. But through it all we have been kept from a rational development by adherence to the tradition of the German common school,—the tradition which treats higher subjects as the exclusive property of the aristocracy.