Читать книгу The New Education - Scott Nearing - Страница 9

Let us face the facts honestly. If you include country schools, and they must be included in any discussion of American Education, the school mortality—i.e., the children who drop out of school between the first and eighth years—is appalling. We may quarrel over percentages, but the dropping out is there.

The United States Commissioner of Education writes—[13] “Of twenty-five million children of school age (5 to 18), less than twenty million are enrolled in schools of all kinds and grades, public and private; and the average daily attendance does not exceed fourteen million, for an average school term of less than 8 months of 20 days each. The average daily attendance of those enrolled in the public schools is only 113 days in the year, less than 5¾ months. The average attendance of the entire school population is only 80½ days, or 4 months of 20 days each. Assuming that this rate of attendance shall continue through the 13 school years (5 to 18), the average amount of schooling received by each child of the school population will be 1,046 days, or a little more than 5 years of 10 school months. This bureau has no reliable statistics on the subject, but it is quite probable that less than half the children of the country finish successfully more than the first 6 grades; only about one-fourth of the children ever enter high school; and less than 8 in every 100 do the full 4 years of high school work. Fewer than 5 in 100 receive any education above the high school.”

Taking this dropping out into consideration, it is probable that the majority of children who enter American schools receive no more education than will enable them to read clumsily, to write badly, to spell wretchedly, and to do the simplest mathematical problems (addition, subtraction, etc.) with difficulty. In any real sense of the word, they are neither educated nor cultured.

Judge Draper, Superintendent of Public Instruction in New York State, writes—[14] “We cannot exculpate the schools. They are as wasteful of child life as are the homes. From the bottom to the top of the American educational system we take little account of the time of the child. … We have eight or nine elementary grades for work which would be done in six if we were working mainly for productivity and power. We have shaped our secondary schools so that they confuse the thinking of youth and break the equilibrium between education and vocations, and people and industries. … In the graded elementary schools of the State of New York, less than half of the children remain to the end of the course. They do not start early enough. They do not attend regularly enough. The course is too full of mere pedagogical method, exploitation and illustration, if not of kinds and classes of work. The terms are too short and the vacations too long. … More than half of the children drop out by the time they are fourteen or fifteen, the limits of the compulsory attendance age, because the work of the schools is behind the age of the pupils, and we do not teach them the things which lead them and their parents to think it will be worth their while to remain.”

Observe that Judge Draper writes of the graded schools only. Could you conceive of a more stinging rebuke to an institution from a man who is making it his business to know its innermost workings?

These statements refer, not to the small percentage of children who go to high school, but to that great mass of children who leave the school at, or before, fourteen years of age. If you do not believe them, go among working children and find out what their intellectual qualifications really are.

One fact must be clearly borne in mind—the school system is a social institution. In the schools are the people’s children. Public taxes provide the funds for public education. Perhaps no great institution is more generally a part of community interest and experience than the public school system.

The most surprising thing about the school figures is the overwhelming proportion of students in the elementary grades—17,050,441 of the 18,207,803. If you draw three lines, the first representing the number of children in the elementary schools, the second showing the number in the high school, and the third the number of students in colleges, professional and normal schools, the contrast is astonishing.

It is perfectly evident, therefore, that the real work of education must be done in the elementary grades. The high schools with a million students, and the universities, colleges, professional and normal schools with three hundred thousand more, constitute an increasingly important factor in education; at the same time, for every seven students in these higher schools, there are ninety-three children in the elementary grades. The proportion is so unexpected that it staggers us—more than nine-tenths of the children who attend school in the United States are in the elementary grades! Can this be the school system of which our forefathers dreamed when they established a universal, free education nearly a hundred years ago? Did they foresee that such an overwhelming proportion of American children would never have an opportunity to secure more than the rudiments of an education?

Be that as it may, the facts glower menacingly at us from city, town and countryside—the overcrowded elementary grades and the higher schools with but a scant proportion of the students. So, if we wish to educate the great mass of American children, we must go to the primary grades to do it.

There are, in the public schools, 533,606 teachers, four-fifths of whom are women. These teachers are at work in 267,153 school buildings having a total value of $1,221,695,730. Each year some four hundred and fifty million dollars are devoted to maintaining and adding to this educational machine.

The school system is the greatest saving fund which the American people possess. The total value of school property is greater than the entire fortune of the richest American. Each year the people spend upon their schools a sum sufficient to construct a Panama Canal or a transcontinental railway system. Thus the public school is the greatest public investment in the United States.

It is one thing to invest, and quite a different matter to be assured a fair return on the investment. Nevertheless, the individual investor believes in his right to a fair return. From their public investments, the people, in fairness, can demand no more; in justice to themselves, they may accept no less. Are they receiving a fair return? The people of the United States have invested nearly a billion dollars in the public school system; each year they contribute nearly half a billion dollars more toward the same end. Are they getting what they pay for?

Turn to another section of the Report of the Commissioner of Education, and note how, in mild alarm, he protests against teachers’ salaries so low “that it is clearly impossible to hire the services of men and women of good native ability and sufficient scholarship, training and experience to enable them to do satisfactory work;” against the schoolhouses, which are “cheap, insanitary, uncomfortable and unattractive;” against “thousands of schools” in which “one teacher teaches from twenty to thirty classes a day;” against “courses of study ill-adapted to the interest of country children or the needs of country life;” against “a small enrollment of the total children of school age,” and a school attendance so low that “the average of the entire school population is only 80½ days per year.”[15]

The tone of these statements is certainly not reassuring. Perhaps it is high time that the citizens inquired into the status of their educational securities—their public school system.