Part 5 (1/2)
=The persistency of habit=--In striving to exalt and ennoble work, the school runs counter to habits of thought that have been formed in the ho imposed work as a task that the school finds it difficult to e The father and mother have so often complained of their work, in the presence of their children, that all work comes to assume the aspect of a hardshi+p, if not a penalty It often happens, too, that the parents encourage their children to think that education affords immunity from work, and the children attend school with that notion firmly implanted in their minds They seem to think that when they have achieved an education they will receive their reward in the choicest gifts that Fortune has to bestow, and that their only responsibility will be to indicate their choices
=Misconceptions of work=--Still further, when children enter school imbued with this conception of work, they feel that the work of the school is imposed upon them as a task from which they would fain be free If their parents had only been as wise as Tom Sawyer and had set up motives before them in connection with their home activities and thus exalted all their work to the plane of privilege, the work of the school would be greatly siht task to eradicate this misconception of work, but soet on Until this is done, the work of the school will be done grudgingly instead of buoyantly, and work that is done under compulsion is never joyous work Nor ork that is done under compulsion ever be done in full measure, as the days of slavery clearly prove
=Illustrations=--Life and work are synonyate their relation The man who does not work does not have real life, as the invalid will freely witness The traes to exist, but he does not really live, no matter what his philosophy may be Many children interpret life toto do, but this conception merely proves that they are children with childishin his private car and conceive his life to be one of ease and luxury They do not realize that the private car affords him the opportunity to do more and better work They see the president of the bank sitting in his private office and i that his nitude, problems that would appall his subordinates They cannot know, as he sits there, that he is projecting his thoughts into far-off lands, and is watching the manifold and complex processions of commerce in their relations to the world of finance
=Concrete examples=--They see the architect in his luxurious apart everyto tower toward the sky They see a Grant sitting beneath a tree in apparent unconcern, but do not know that he is bearing the responsibility of the move his books, but do not know the travail of spirit that he experiences in his yearning for his parishi+oners They see the far at ease in the shade, but do not know that he is visualizing every detail of his farm, the men at their tasks, the flocks and herds, the crops, the streams, the machinery, the fences, and the orchards and vineyards They see the e clad in his s the sea breezes the sahts are concentrated upon the safety of his hundreds of passengers and his precious cargo
=The potency of mental work=--Only by experience may children come to know that work ed with the responsibility of affording this experience Through experience they will come to know that mind transcends matter, and that in life the body yields obedience to the behests of the mind They will co than physical work, in that a single mind plans the work for a thousand hands They will learn that mental work has redee life reeable even if more complex They will cooceans, and exploring the sky
They will come to realize that ned our machinery, made our homes more co=--As a knowledge of all these things filters into their minds, their conception of life broadens, and they see more and more clearly that life and work are fundamentally identical They see that work directs the streanificance They soon see that knowledge is power only because it is the agency that generates power, and that knowledge touches life at every point They will coreat luxury in life, and that education is designed to increase the capacity for work in order that people e in this luxury more abundantly
The more work one can do, the her the quality of that life They learn that the adage ”Work to live and live to work” is no fiction but a reality
=Work and enjoyment=--The school, therefore, becomes to them a workshop of life, and unless it is that, it is not a worthy school It is not a soral part of life and therefore a place and an occasion for work The school is the Burning Bush of work that is to grow into the Tree of Life But life ought to tee Work, therefore, being synonyh it taxes the powers to the utalley-slave goes to his task, there is a lack of adjustment and balance somewhere, and a readjustment is necessary It matters not that a boy spends two hours over a proble the tirade or to escape punishment, the tihtfully belongs to him, and some better motive should be supplied
=The teacher's problem=--The teacher's mission is not to make school work easy, but, rather, to ain, shea fence is quite as hard work as solving a problem in decimals or cube root Much depends upon the mental attitude of the boy, and this in turn depends upon the skill of the teacher and her fertility ofa fence causes the arroeary and the back to ache, but the boys recked not of that On the contrary, they clamored for more of the same kind of work This same spirit characterizes the work of the vitalized school The pupils live as joyously in the schoolrooreater their joy
When work is e by the expert teacher, school procedure becoh auto, or badgering Such things are abnormal in life and no less so in the vitalized school They are a confession on the part of the teacher that she has reached the limit of her resources She admits that she cannot do what Tom Sawyer did so well, and so proclaims her inability to articulate life and work effectively
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1 Read that chapter of ”To episode
2 What principles of teaching did Tom Sawyer apply?
3 Discuss, from the pupils' viewpoint, how the study of different subjects e
4 In accordance with Toy, discuss plans for the for habit in pupils How direct the pupils' choice of reading matter?
5 Hoould you de than ? How convince an indolent pupil of this truth?
7 State the chief probleical doctrines of this chapter are not to be classified under the head of ”soft pedagogy”
CHAPTER X
WORDS AND THEIR CONTENT
=Initial statement=--Life and words are so closely interwoven that we have only to study words with care in order to achieve an apprehension of life Indeed, educationthe content of words No two of us speak the sah we use the same words The schoolboy and the savant speak of education, using the same word, but the boy has only the faintest conception of theof the word as used by the savant We must know the content of the words that are used before we can understand one another, either in speaking or in writing For one ; for another, the sanorant boor, the word ”education” means far less than the three R's, while to the scholar the word includes languages, ancient and h many voluht of the earth and the distances and movements of the planets, history from the Rosetta Stone to the latest presidential election, and philosophy from Plato to the scholar of to-day
=The word ”education”=--And yet both these norantof the hen he speaks or writes it Still the word is in common use, and people who use it are wont to think that their conception of itsis universal If the boor could follow the expansion of the word as it is invested with greater and greater content, he would, in time, understand Aristotle, Shakespeare, Gladstone, and Max Muller And, understanding these e, and so would come to appreciatethe expansion of the word, onecircle produced by throwing a pebble into a pool; but a better conception would be the expansion of a balloon when it is being inflated This coes as a sphere rather than as a circle
=The scholar's concept of the sea=--The six-year-old can give the correct spelling of the word _sea_ as readily as the sage, but the sage has spent a lifeti content into the word For hiic leading he retraces his journeys through physiography and geology, watching the sea wear ao thousand feet of the Appalachian Mountains and spread the detritus over vast areas, reat fertile corn and wheat belt of our country He knows that this section produces, annually, such a quantity of corn as would require for transportation a procession of teams that would encircle the earth nine times, at the equator, and he interprets all this as sea The word leads hiy, revealing to hiin of the rain, the snow, the dew, and the frost, with all the wonders of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation