Newspapers / The State’s Voice (Dunn, … / Feb. 15, 1935, edition 1 / Page 2
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PHILOSOPHIZING ABOUT THE NATURE AND THE PROCESS OF EDUCATION (Continued from Page One) and conclusively from his limited supply of facts is better educated than the man who has gone through the schools, possesses encyclopaedic knowledge stored away in air-tight compart ments, it is readily seen that the mere tot before he has ever seen a book may begin the attainment of those abilities. It is also evident that multi ; tudes of children are passing through the con secutive grades without even beginning the ac quirement of an education. What they, have learned is as. useless to them as the layman’s car load pf byicks, the ignorant bride’s biscuit ma terials, or the minute knowledge of the would-be author who cannot see the forest for the trees. The Primary Qra.de* pf Dominant Importance. The first year of school is a crucial period. Then is the time to. begin the real process of edu cation, . . The children come from various environments. One who has never been to school a day may be better educated than another can be within two ; years. To one the language oi the school may be virtually a foreign language. The teacher must discover deficiences or encumbrances arising from poor environment and supply or eradicate them. (Inhibitions, marked by badh fulness, must be re moved. On the other hand, judicious repression ntay be necessary in some cases. In many cases, the teaching of phonics and reading will be the least important of the tasks incumbent upon the teacher of first-year pupils. T'o the foregoing ends, the teacher will find it to,her advantage to group a large grade into small classes for much of the work. Many chil dren cannot be taught successfully in a large ' group. And none should be forced to attempt to ^give attention for a long period of instruction. To give it- is an injury to the child; to. fail to give it is fatal to the child’s future attainments, for, mind-you, the very first goal in the educational process is that of developing the power of atten tion. . Without such development the child’s edu cational possibilities are already eclipsed. And the child needing such cultivation most is the 1 one to suffer most when an attempt is made to ' bold the attention of a large group for a long period. ' ' - Three minutes several times a day given to a . slow pupil will be worth more to him than the 'Whole day given a group, of forty of which it is a "haihdicapped member. An hour a day, in fifteen “minute periods, will prove of more value to any ■ homogeneous group of ten of forty pupils than 'the whole school period spent with the group as ' “a'whole. Recitation benches should be no longer ’strangers to a modern school room. However, groups may he formed at the desks. Of course < the first grouping will be more or less experi ? mental. Transfers can be made at any time. • ‘"Many a time a backward child simply needs patieni; coaching or constant drilling till the cue is recognized. When Helen Keller’s teacher at tempted to reach the insulated mind of her blind arid deaf and dumb pupil by a certain touch Which was intended to signify water day after ' day passed without progress. Losing her pa tience one day, the teacher soused the child’s ’ head under the pump flow and then made a suc ■ Cession of the touches. Light broke. The mind, "closed up formerly as tight as an oyster in its < shell, was at once vitalized. The child led the teacher about all the afternoon swiftly learning the touch name of various objects. Helen Keller Was that hour of the pump incident saved from 'a life of absolute mental and social isolation. An Example from the Writer s Personal Experience. , „ I was teaching a group of thirty pupils or more,' including one beginner and small groups of various advancement up to a small class in Latin. Such a task was the usual thing with teachers forty to fifty years ago. I started the beginner on a reading chart. There were a pic ture of the traditional cat, a cat and the cat—artso the phrase it is on the first page. It took days to perfect her recognition of those three word ^groups. Bfit no let-up occurred till they were mastered. Two or three times a day an advanced pupil, thus paying his tuition fee, taught her a few minutes. I taught her one or two five-minute periods. Directly she could not have been held bade. And before the five-month term expired she deliberately walked up to the class in which her brother three or four years older was making alow headway on the poor foundation he had re ceived and ended the term in his arithmetic, reading, apd spelling classes. She could read &Ubl}? in Holmes’ Xhird Reader, spell well in the CONCURRING WITH THE WW'b vuw By ARNOLD A* McKAY. I commend whole-heartedly your articles on teachers. Having spent more than fifteen, years in the classroom (not the front office) I concur substantially in all you say about the profession. It is lamentably true that the profession does not any longer attract the best men; and I can. show this, briefly Ijy a personal citation. ; While working toward my master's degree at Chapel Hill in 1915, I was given charge of two, (sections of sub-freshman English. (To begin •with, entrusting to an inexperienced teacher stu dents already handicapped is always putrid peda gogy; but the professors couldn’t be bothered with them.) These men had had defective preparations in English. But many of them were really ineducable, dull, and quite congenitally unfitted to do college work- It was the begin ning, however, of the Age of Every hfan a Col lege Man Whether or’ No. We noddled, through somehow. A decade later I took a job with a textbook concern traveling the state. Imagine my amazement and chagrin to find a dozen and more of my former stay pupils occupy ing lucrative administrative positions, in. our school system! That is a fact; and if anybody doubts it, I have my class rolls. The Schools* No Place for the Money-Conscious. Similarly, this hullabaloo about poor salaries for teachers leaves me unimpressed. Of course teachers should be paid more. That is, some of them should. If a teacher becomes, money-con scious, however, the sooner he leaves t;he profes sion and returns to his natural .element, trading the better it will be for the group of humanity he is trying to serve. My own conviction is that no natural-born teacher is going to leave the pro fession because he is not being paid enough, any more than a conscientious preacher \yill desert his spiritual pasture for the sam,e reason.. After all it takes a surprisingly small amount of the filthy stuff for intelligent folfi to Kve on. If hard times shakes out a few of the pretentious noise makers in education and sends them to fatten by getting and taking profits, nobody loses anything. Furthermore, we must not forget that all of our state-supported institutions of higher learn-r ing grew out of bounds, fike Florida swamp sites, during the era of easy credit. Teachers’ colleges ,*over the state are turning out between 1,000 and 1,500 teachers every commencement after two Harrington Speller class, and was working arith metic astonishingly w*eH. The point is: that little girl in p group of thirty or forty might have been left in the lurch and handicapped for life. As. it was, those first days of patient. worl$ prepared the way far the most remarkable experience I had in a period of more tfia« a score of years as a teacfier. She had to have the cue. There are other insulators besides those of blindness and deafness. Dul lards in the senior class may possibly owe their state to failures that might have been avoided in the first grade. Don’t Be Afraid of Breaikng Up the Grade. But the average teacher of this day can scarce ly conceive of teaching forty or fifty pupils broken up into several groups. As usual, I know what I am talking about. At Burgaw just forty years ago I was teaching a group of sixty pupils grading all the way up from the primer to alge bra and other high school subjects. My only help was that of one of the grown girls who helped me part of the day—three hours, I be lieve—in payment of1 her tuition. Yet no pupil had fewer than four recitation^ a day, and the progress was generally satisfactory. In such a case, the smallness of the class groups multiplies the classes considerably more than the desired grouping in a single grade will. The old-time teacher simply bad to know how to make his time court. I have taught two arithmetic classes many a day at the same time, also two spelling .classes. But you may bet your life that they were thoroughly drilled. Those arithmetic classes were not allowed to bring in their solved problems on paper. They had to “work” them before the eyes of the teacher, and not pnly those in the book but as many off-hand ones involving the principle at issue as was necessary to estab lish the fact that they understood the principle and its application. Teachers Shquld Be Unfettered. Grouping the pupils of the grades, from the first grade up to eleventh, should be found not only feasible but inspiring to the highest efforts on the part of hath those of few and those o.f many talents. The former get the teaching and drill they so badly need; the latter are not bored to a frazzle with teaching they do not need. But year nominal training. At t_uap,el Hill, Ra leigh, and Greensboro we have institutions quite preditable to a southern state. Deans, depart ments, “crip” courses, and ineducable students multiplied and thrived rathe*- shamelessly in the ^ood old days; and have now become a state burden since na more money can be borrowed. Now it’s their turn to do a little scraping of the bottom of the barrel, for patriot! ~ -—rposes. All Itheir data about ’salaries and ouch would have greater credence were it np.t for tvyo. facts: first, ui good times salaries were higher at these col leges than at other colleges and universities of similar tank; and second, they are still maintain ing, or trying tp maintain, duplicating functions which in any policy of state retrenchment - (Should be summarily discarded for reasons of economy if for nothing else, fhfc h&eral t$ Schools. It is nopsense to talk about how rich we are. Only 6, of the 48. states hav,e a lower per capita wealth, thun we—all southern, states. Is there anyone sanguine, enough to. say that, compared with oiir sister commonwealths, we have not done munificently well by our children of school age? Incidentally and unfortunately, we haye a higher per capita, indebtedness, not oply of any sputheru state, but of any state that makes upi our union. A hard fact, but a true one that we must face for years to come. We do need more money to spend-wisely in education. But where is it coming from? If we must have a sales tax, let it be a graduated one ‘—one beginning, say, at 1-2 of 1 per cent, on the necessaries of fife and extending fan-wise to a 5 per cent, and even 10- per cent, tax on non-neces saries and socalled luxuries like Packards, fur coats, cocktail shakers, 25-cent cigars, women radio speakers, et cetera; with no amount limit. As for other tax sources, it is not at all likely that any of our robust industrial cows will stand for another pail. We are in a sorry mess financially. I don’t know the answer. The teachers, like other intel ligent minorities, helped to get us in this fix, spent much of the money. Now?, th i can help get us out if they will stop whining) t 1 ua where the money can fee got; and keep sera). :ig the bar rel.' That’s it. Keep scraping- the barrel!; For it is written: “The barrelof meal shall not waste .... until the Lord sendeth rain ttpeya the earth.” no dictation of the progress a,ny student shall make, whether slow or rapid, should be imposed by a “course, of study.’’ If teachers are fit for their jobs, they are better judges, of the progress their pupils should make than the makers of a general course of study. Yet I should advise that the very brightest remain*in the1 school the full term pf years,. Let them sftudy Latin, geometry, trigonometry, extend their work in literature, history pnd the sciences, and thoroughly subsoil the other subjects that many of the pupils can only scratch the surface of. On the other hand, if it takes, ten years for a slow poke to master the material comprised in the first five years of the course, keep him at it . that long or let him quit school. Whoever knows the contents of the texts of the fjrst five ye?11'5 probably has a better fact foundation for the formation of a philosophy of life than Dean House’s Socrates had. But if such a pupil passes through all the grades and comes out without an understanding of any of them as many are cio ing, his whole time has been wasted, and also the teachers’ time. Only thoroughly mastered facts and theories can contribute to that intangi ble webb called education or culture. Organization and regimentation may be the key to successful mass production in the indus tries, but not in the schools, Teachers should be permitted to allow every student to accomplish vyhat he can, but:.to suffer him to attempt no more than he can successfully master. Thus may the task be gauged-to the in tellect and adapted to either the abstract-minded Or the thing-minded. I have been trying to find a quitting- place for this discussion for more than a month. I foresee now only a discussion of v optional education and moral and spiritual training. - Liquor And Socialism Editor of The State’s Voiced Wheq a man of the type'of John Sprqnt Hill fathers a bill to socialize liquor ip North Caro lina, it' is evident that the liquor people of the State ate yvillmg to, enact- a socialistic law, pro vided it wiir make liquor available. If the' State, fe tc< 'geyinto the liquor business, (Continued On Page Three)
The State’s Voice (Dunn, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
Feb. 15, 1935, edition 1
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