Читать книгу The New Education - Scott Nearing - Страница 19

The very thought of city life precludes the possibility of home work. The narrow house, the tenement, the great shop or factory, on the one hand, prevent the mechanic from carrying on his trade near his family; and on the other hand, make it impossible for the father whose work lies far from his home to give his boys the “special care and guidance” about which Froebel writes.

The system of industry which was established in England during the closing decades of the eighteenth century, and which secured a foothold in both Germany and the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, has revolutionized the basis of our lives. The workshop has been transplanted from the home to the factory; both men and women leave their homes for ten, eleven, or even twelve hours a day to carry on their industrial activities; great centers of population collect about the centers of industry; the farm, the flock of geese, the garden, the forest, and the blacksmith shop disappear; food, clothing, and other necessaries of life—formerly the product of home industry—are produced in great factories; and the city home, stripped of its industrial functions, restricted in scope, robbed of its adults, presents little opportunity for the education of the city child. Standing on the threshold of his meager dwelling, this child of six looks forward to a life which must be based on the instruction provided in a public school system.

The country boy still has his ten-acre lot, where he may run and play. There are flowers and freckles in the spring; kite-flying, fishing, hunting, and trapping in summer and autumn. The general farm is a storehouse of useful information in rudimentary form. From day to day and from year to year the country boy may learn and enjoy.

The city boy is differently situated. His playground is the street, where he plays under the wheels of wagons, automobiles, and trolley cars; or else he plays in a public playground in company with hundreds, or even thousands, of other children. Even then his activities are restricted by city ordinances, monitors, policemen, and other exponents of law and order.

The city home, whether tenement or single house, cannot begin to supply the opportunities for growth and development which were furnished by life in the open. Where else, then, does the responsibility for such growth and development rest than upon the school? On the farm the boy learned his trade, as Froebel suggests, at the hands of his father. The father of the city boy spends his working hours in a mill, or in an office, where boys under fourteen or sixteen are forbidden by law to go. The city home is unavoidably deprived of the chance to provide adequate recreation or adequate vocational training for its children. The burden in both cases shifts to the school.

A hundred years ago practically all industries were carried on in connection with the home. The weaver, the carpenter, the hatter, the cobbler, the miller, lived and worked on the same premises. Then steam was applied to industry; the machine replaced the man; semi-skilled and unskilled labor replaced skilled labor; great numbers of men and women, and even of children, crowded together in factories to spin thread, make bolts and washers, weave ribbon, bake bread, manufacture machinery, or do some one of the many hundreds of things now done in factories. The change from home industry to factory industry is well named the Industrial Revolution. It completely overturned the established and accepted means of making a living.

The industrial upheaval has changed every phase of modern life. Industry itself has replaced apprenticeship by a degree of specialization undreamed of in primitive life. From the superintendent to the office boy, from the boss roller to the yard laborer, from the chief clerk to the stenographer, the work of men and women is monotonous and specialized. The city has grown up as a logical product of an industrial system which centers thousands, or even tens of thousands, of workmen in one place of employment. The city home differs fundamentally from the country home as the city differs from the country.

The changes now going on in farming are no less significant than those which the nineteenth century witnessed in manufacturing. Science has been applied to agriculture. Old methods are brought into question. Intensive study and specialization are widespread. The time has passed when a farmer can afford to neglect the agricultural bulletins or papers. To be successful, he must be a trained specialist in his line, and the school and college are called upon to provide the training.

No individual is responsible for these changes. They have come as the logical product of a long series of discoveries and inventions. New methods, built upon the ideas and methods of the past, have created a new civilization.

The civilized world, reorganized and reconstituted, rebuilt in all of its economic phases, demands a new teaching which shall relate men and women to the changed conditions of life. This is the new basis for education—this the new foundation upon which must be erected a superstructure of educational opportunity for succeeding generations. It remains for education to recognize the change and to remodel the institutions of education in such a way that they shall meet the new needs of the new life.