IN AMERICA

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 117, 13 November 1929, Page 18

IN AMERICA

EDUCATION RUN WILD

THE NEW KINDERGARTEN

There was a time when the education of the young in the United States was a simple process. When a child reached the age of seven years he was taken to the nearest Echoolhouse, where a teacher "rammed and clouted the rudiments of enlightenment into him." If a mother found seven continuous years of ceaseless association with her children, burdensome, she could shorten the ordeal by; transferring : tho load to the kindergarten teacher. The kindergarten taught the child nothing save how to ainuss himself inoffensively, but as tho mother ■ found it an adequate, substitute for an expensivo nurse, the kindergarten thrived.

To-day the simplicity of the kindergarten has vanished, write Graco Adams and Edward Hutter in the "American Mercury." Some kindergartens take a child at the age of two years and keep him until his later "'teens," taking over all responsibility from hisparents except that of paying for him. All the while thekindergarten protects him from the horrors of what is ordinarily regarded as fitting education. This movement is.known as progressive education. Old teaching methods have disappeared. The children, in these new schools are rescued from darkness by all the ingenious devices of the New Psychology. The most conservative of the progressive methods is known as the laboratory plan; . the aim is to socialise the school and make it a cooperative community. On tho staff there is no place for such anti-social individuals as teachers. The presiding women aro known as hostesses, and as such- they - have no authority. Their duties aro simply to preside over conferences with the children, who voluntarily "contract for a job." What is called the "project method" is widelyused. . . THE LADDER OF LEARNING. A project is "an activity chosen and initiated by tho child as an expression of its own intellectual needs and desires." ,It may be anything from driving nails to reading "The Story of Philosophy." Though these projects

are supposed to spring spontaneously from the children without suggestions from the "hostesses," there is a surprising similarity in the "projects" in the different schools year after year. An official account of the development of a project covers a whole term, the whole school being involved in it. It begins in a simple manner with the children becoming particularly -joyous in making a close acquaintance with sheep ana lambs. Apparently spontaneously they gather in the school chapel singing "How sweet is the shepherd's lot," and reciting the 23rd Psalm. They then begin to dance and to improvise melodies. Afterwards they settle to animated discussions of the different kinds of sheep. They cover their walls with pictures-of sheep and decide to go in 'for weaving. When the weather improves they move out of doors, still thinking of sheep, and, making .tents of rugs, they pretend, to be Bedouins. The'problem of how to provide the children with elementary knowledge without interfering with their creative activities ig causing a good deal of thought. One method 5 is to "inject practical experience" into a project. If the children decide to play at street cars, they are asked casually by the "hostess" how much money the conductor should collect. "Thus, without knowing it, the children have obtained a practical experience of arithmetic."

Though a child may, through progressive education, become a "psychologically adjusted free soul," if he wishes to acquire in addition what the prosaic, world regards as education, ho must renounce the kindergarten at the age of 14 years. The progressive teachers have been reluctantly compelled to face the fact, since the United States has "a medieval passion for encyclopaedic information." So far they have found no way out of this deplorable situation. There are excellent grounds for supposing that they never will while there are examinations which test the pupils' possession of a knowledge of facts which/ the creative educators have decided are fatal to meditation, reflection, and judgment.