A Key to we Hearr or THE Cunonen A Research about Character and Practical Education in the United States of America and other Countries, Edited by The Children's Friends, Amsterdam.
The Children's Friends is an association in Holland whose object it is "To develop joy in life, idealism, love of art and self-reliance among children" and the group being entirely non-professional it thereby hopes to attain a more objective point of view upon its subject. Some time ago the institution sent a small group of representatives to America to investigate the school system there and this report embodies their findings together With notes on the school systems of other countries, It must be said at once that the whole book is greatly marred, firstly by its format—four pamphlets enclosed in a loose and awkward paper binding—and secondly by the fact that it has evidently been written by a foreigner with only the most elementary knowledge of English, of our complicated grammar and impossible spelling, so that every page is full of gross proof-reading errors and grammatical mistakes. It would be a pleasanter book to read if it had been first revised by an English proofreader.
Conventional And Otherwise This criticism apart, however, the book is a fascinating study of different school systems, especially in America. The group went from school to school asking' questions of both pupils and teachers, and visited many different types of institution. For instance, they went to Pelham and were taken to visit one of the oldest of the public schools by the Superintendent of the school system. They were struck by the happy appearance of the children, the inforality of the atmosphere and of the relation between the teachers and pupils and the excellent order which was due to the fact that each child had a task which interested it. The furniture in the classrooms was movable and could be pushed to one side if more floor-space was wanted for games or other activities, a happy change from the immovable and uncomfortable forms of our childhood which still unhappily persist in more than one school which ought to know better, Their reaction, however, to the big negro school which they visited in New York—which for some unexplained reason was staffed by white people—showed a willingness to accept conventional reactions to racial differences which was not as progressive as the rest of their attitude. They make the quite unprovable statement that "the negro child does not have the ability or aptitude for abstract thinking that the average white child has."
Theory And Practice One of the most interesting places ited was the Lincoln School which is used for observation and instruction by the pupils of Teachers' College, Columbia University, and is probably the most progressive of all American public schools, The work done relies greatly on the initiative of the children; for instance, each child was allowed to choose his own book for the reading class and was expected to tell the rest of the class about what he had read. If he had chosen badly or told the story uninterestingly the other children would very soon make it clear to him by their restlessness and lack of interes No direct "moral instruction" was given because the whole atmosphere of the school instilled good manners and consideration for others; the teachers had grasped the fundamental principle that the average child is avid to learn and will digest everything that is given to it if only the teaching is done intelligently and interest ingly and a chance given to children to display their own initiative. A splendid example of the correlation of different types of instruction was shown in the music class where the children, who had been studying Egyptian music, became interested in zithers. They made their own instruments in the manual training shops and then brought them back to the music classes and learnt how to play them and compose tunes on them America Ahead The main trends of education in America are democratic and progress sive and this must lead to a higher cultural level of the whole nation. This is unhappily not true of most other countries. Even in the short report on English schools we get the impression of a system soaked with tradition and hampered by all sorts of outworn ideas which have never been properly sloughed off. Most of the continental school systems suffer from the extensive curriculum which the secondary-school pupils are forced to cover; it makes education a burden to children in their teens, a difficult period of development in any case when every child should have a
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.