content of subjects of study and have found the confusion not destructively disconcerting. Rather have they found that constructive improvement of subjects awaken teachers to new confidence in the progress of education. THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN CURRICULUM MAKING* IN By WILLIAM MCANDREW, Associate Superintendent of N THE Ypsilanti Normal School, forty-two years ago, we had a teacher not content with the incompleteness of courses of study, but active in extending them by means of more modern matter dictated from our note books. In mine I find an incident of the Franco-Prussian War: "When the French defeat was recognized as beyond repair, Jules Favre and a commission waited upon Bismarck. The French people,' said Favre, 'desired no attack upon Germany. An insane militaristic group stampeded them into it. You have said you wage this war not upon France, but upon the Emperor. There is no Emperor. We have deposed him. With humility, with bowed heads, beaten to our knees, we can only throw ourselves upon your generosity.' "Then Bismarck made this famous reply: 'Generosity,' said Bismarck, 'there is no such word in my vocabulary"." practicing it by sending food and clothing, money and supplies to a hundred thousand homeless in fire-stricken Chicago. At the time our Ypsilanti teacher was expounding generosity as an American trait, Rutherford B. Hayes, in the face of virulent abuse from a blatant minority, was practicing it toward the South. From year to year that Ypsilanti teacher's pupils, teachers themselves, along with thousands of other teachers in Michigan, or Maine,or Florida, or Oregon, have used the Spanish War, or the Boxer indemnity, of the World conflict, or the Hoover service, or the Red Cross work, to remind the coming citizen of what may be summed up in Roosevelt's words, that "To be an American is to lead a life of action, helping in our several communities, in the state, in the nation, what is right and decent and lofty and generous.' GENEROSITY A FAMOUS AMERICAN TRAIT "Generosity" is a winsome word. It belongs to an honorable family. Its relatives, "genial," "gentle," "gentleman," "gentlewoman," "congenial," "ingenious," "genuine," suggest expansive thoughts. Their power lies in that small syllable "gen," which relates them to the generation, the breed, the race, the people. Generous means full of gens-quality; generositas, generosity, is the race feeling, humanity. That Ypsilanti teacher, a generation and a half ago, thought and taught that generosity is a word which is and ought to be a frequent one in the vocabulary of Americans. Beginning with a welcome to the oppressed of the old world, the nation touched a highest mark of unselfishness when its greatest citizen, endowed with the immeasurable power and prestige of victory, replied to Colonel Nicola's offer of a crown, "If you have any regard for your country, banish these thoughts from your mind." At the time when Bismarck was boasting of the absence of this word from his vocabulary, America was vigorously partment of Superintendence, Cleveland, Feb. 28, 1923. Your president selected it for discussion here as an essential in determining a *Address delivered at a meeting of the N. E. A. De course of study. "The human element in curriculum making." Your first Americans adopted it when Franklin and Washington, Adams and Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, proposed that education should be made a public concern and used for the purpose of maintaining a human ideal adopted as the central principle of the nation, to wit: the ideal of human equality, liberty, happiness, union, justice, domestic tranquillity, common defense, general welfare. Theretofore emphasis upon personal, individual, distinction and advantage as the purpose of education had been respectable through the ages. I could conduct a private pay school for the purpose of "perfecting the whole man, physical, moral, and mental," or "to introduce youth to his cultural inheritance," or "to fit him for his environment," or "to prepare for college," or "to enable him to make a living," or "to teach him those things which are commonly regarded as the schoolmaster's function." In so doing I should be performing an act held legitimate for thousands of years. Seventy-one per cent of the eminent educators of America, replying to the Brooklyn Eagle's inquiry of the purpose of education, confined themselves to the objectives just given. There is a conspicuous fact in public education that makes these purposes inadequate. It is that, in every state and territory of the Union, public education is a charge upon all the people, not upon only parents, relatives, and those attending school. This fact makes it difficult to justify the taxing of a childless man in order that the son of a neighbor may per fect his whole-self, or be introduced to his cultural inheritance, or be fitted for his environment, or be prepared for college, or to make a living, or to have anything done for him for his individuaul benefit. Nor did Franklin, or Washington, or Adams, or Jefferson, or Madison, or Monroe, or anyone who advocated making education a charge upon all the people, indicate that any of these purposes were what they had in mind. Those aims seem to belong to a prerevolutionary education. They were entrenched so firmly that when Horace Mann argued for the American purpose, the leading schoolmasters of New England attempted to hoot him out of court. These old intents hung on so hard that 71 per cent of the Brooklyn Eagle's schoolmasters subscribed to them in 1903. How is it now? How strong is this American human element recognized in organizing what the public schools do? That is, in making the curriculum? Ask the men most conversant with the situation in different sections of the country "what should the curriculum be?" These are the answers of February, 1923: PUBLIC SCHOOL IDEALS FROM VARIOUS SECTIONS New England: A. H. Wild: “Public school curriculum: An outline of daily school occupations tending to supply the community with the most valuable citizens we know how to train." Payson Smith: "The curriculum must show a change from individual gain to service. It is not to make the boy get ahead, to make money. The curriculum aims for the public benefit." Middle Atlantic States: Thomas Finnegan: "A course conducive of the spirit of loyalty to the common state and nation." Wm. L. Ettinger: "It ought to be a recipe for the nation's morale, civic welfare, patriotic fiber." The Great Lakes Region: E. C. Hartwell: "A preparation for citizenship." Charles S. Meek: "A guide to social service." Frank Cody: "A plan for training social efficiency in a democracy." Along the Potomac: F. W. Ballou: "To fit for service to society.' The Ohio Valley: Randall Condon: “A plan by which children may happily be prepared for efficient service." Middle West: John H. Beveridge: "A guide for training citizens." The South: A. B. Rhett: "A procedure based on the intent to endow everyone with civic ideals." The Pacific Coast: Fred Hunter: "A plan by which each youth will gain power and desire to use his endowments to their highest point for the highest interest and happiness of himself, his dependents, his country." H. B. Wilson: "A plan of exercises training for the physical, mental, moral, civic requirements of social service." One might here conclude that enough has been said and that the discussion may be considered satisfactorily closed. The samples examined are all sound. The creeds are all orthodox. Why inquire further? Yet every superintendent does go further, and while professing content with the ruling definition of public education, indicates his dissatisfaction with its working out. These are the reported causes preventing the curriculum from guiding to the results proposed: THE TIMIDITY OF THE CURRICULUM First the curriculum itself: "It has too much dead wood in it." "It is influenced too much by earlier curriculums and by too many other communities." "It is conditioned too much by an appetite for completeness of the subject, too little by the main civic purpose of the public school." The Buffalo outlines, covering each division of the course of study, begin with of it, so far as he could see, was personal gain, striving to get ahead of others, hope of reward, selfishness. I can't find many traces of the civic purpose in the grammar of these curriculums. I am told here that grammar is a preparation for clear thinking, an elementary logic. It seems to savor of the old mental discipline theory. I read that grammar is here to enable us to speak correctly. Then I find an enormous amount of old elaborate classification and exercises in mentai juggling that seem to me productive of a power of sleight of mind that doesn't matter. Hardly any of the teachers I supervise give any reason for going through these things except that they have to. It is difficult to find civic purpose in the Latin, the algebra, the geometry, the rhetoric, the bookkeeping, the typewriting, the shopwork, the cooking, the science work in the schools I visit. If these are the tools of the educated man, we, as drawing our wages from the public and not from the relatives of those in school, are obligated to do more toward making clear how these tools, when sharpened, are to be used for public benefit. When I come to the teaching of salesmanship I wonder whether the greater public would not be benefited by a course in protection against sellers, such a course to be a part of the movement for thrift and economy. TRASTED WITH PUBLIC SCHOOL TRADITION a statement of the social purpose of the DIRECTNESS OF BOY SCOUT OBJECTIVES CONschool, and show how the particular subject fits into the general scheme. Oakland does the same. So does Cincinnati. There is a set from one city in which the course. in history, civics, and in thrift display at the beginning of each section a motive for the pursuit of the study so clearly civic that Jefferson might well have written it; but all the other pamphlets, although each begins with a purpose for the subject state that purpose arguing for the subject chiefly, and exhorting in terms of such personal advantage of the individual student as to seem to parallel the school Mr. Roosevelt had in mind when he said the whole object It is surprising how a system like the public schools, with its civic obligations so clearly enunciated by theorists, with its public duties so definitely indicated by the source of financial support, should be distanced in clearness of aim and directness of program by an organization not a charge upon the public at all. Here come Boy Scouts with the purpose of patriotism, service, citizenship, "a good turn daily," on the front page of their prospectus. Why didn't we do this long ago? As it is, we do well to get behind them and boost as best we can. One is haunted by a doubt whether the reason for the inclusion of all the stock contents of the curriculum is a civic and public one. Many of the subjects seem vested interests of us teachers who have spent much time and money acquiring them and so teach them for the reason that geology is made a required subject in a university not far from here. Not enough students elected it to keep the two professors busy. Therefore the trustees made it a compulsory study. I find no record of any curriculum being composed by asking, "What are the public needs of the community which is paying for the schools? What are the daily exercises likely to develop a human output habituated to supply those needs? There is some powerful influence holding the management of schools back from so simple a method of planning school procedure. What is it? The sample superintendents answer: The second obstacle my correspondents mention as preventing the great civic purpose of the public schools is tradition. Mr. Meek finds it hard to get any articulation between the social needs of to-day and the things the children are doing in the schools. This defect is an inheritance we derive from the education developed in autocracies. Safety forbade that any institution dependent on high officials should think on things that really matter. The schoolman's brain concentrated upon things dead and gone. He developed a body of knowledge called scholarship. Its conclusions were academic, immaterial, inconsequential. We have organized a cult that affects a correctness of accent and spelling. We are more ashamed of a grammatical blunder than of ignorance of the crying civic problems of our own society. We have treasured long some old ideas which we call eternal verities, and when we make a course of study we are prone to start with these lest some critic will find them absent from our course and ridicule us as one might mock a banquet guest who lacked evening dress. Some of the correspondent superintendents find the drag of tradition much stronger upon school boards than upon teachers. A school board must must have standards. Where shall it find them? A school board has not time to read, or to take a summer course, or to visit other schools. It must therefore judge propositions by the schools it knows best, the schools of the days when its members were boys. This leads one correspondent to call it "The Board of Anti-Education," and another to propose a summer course for superintendents in the art of educating boards. A closely related hindrance is the third one in these replies: public ignorance of American educational doctrine. STUPIDITIES OF PUBLIC CLAIMS The implications in the fact that all the people pay for the schools are often lost through a narrow fallacy, assuming that only those who pay the taxes on real property are the actual contributors. In vain has it been demonstrated that every one who earns or spends in a community is the real taxpayer. Each year the claims for some advantage come in from a selfselected group. They begin, "We, the taxpayers." Along with these mistaken arguers are those assuming that the parents of children are the sole determinants of what the schools should be. America does not confine school taxes to parents. Bachelors and maiden ladies pay as much as fathers and mothers. This not infrequent criticism for some citizen upon a board of education that he is unqualified because he has no children in the public schools might as fairly be directed at all members of prison boards who have no children in jail. Both services are for the public welfare; not primarily for the inmates or their relatives. The courses must be made more for community betterment than for individual advantage. individual advantage. All the schools I visit show the influence of the selfish desires of children and parents. Emulation between persons thrives in the schools known to me. Prizes, honors, valedictorianships, academic degrees, titles, hang over from an age when education was a distinction for the few and vitiate the American purpose to break down distinctions, to promote equality, to advance general, not individual welfare. The removal of this stumbling block, public ignorance, requires a systematic and more extended use of the method now rapidly growing, namely, straight talks at Kiwanis, Rotary, and other clubs and meetings so as to hammer home the public, not private, purpose of schools. The same ideals in newspaper editorials, short doctrinal talks at graduation exercises, promotion of this gospel through pageants and ceremonial displays, are now in order. The next obstacle enumerated by my experienced correspondents is inefficiency of the school people, superintendents, and teachers; their lack of preparation; their preference for running in the old grooves; their laziness; their content to enjoy cloistered isolation sheltered from the perplexing questions of the hour. There is enough of this left to warrant earnest effort for curing it. In a town not far from here the question of inviting a tobacco factory to establish a branch in that location came up. There was a public meeting addressed by lawyers, doctors, business men, and a minister. No teacher or school official thought of speaking, nor anyone of inviting them; yet it was a community question. But when Harvey Clark inherited an old homestead and found in the attic some books with the imprint of 1680, he gave those to the high school. When the road was cut through the hill and hundreds of fossils were uncovered, they were all given to the State University, where they would feel at home. Here we are, historically expected to teach the coming citizen his politics; here we are, paid by the community, for community benefit, that is politics; and what do we know about politics? Add together all that the teachers under our supervision know of politics; divide it by the number of persons considered, and the amount of poli Every one of the Founders of the Republic had a vivid sense of the dangers to our democracy lurking in selfish appetites which centuries of wrongly organized society had failed to supplant in civic affairs. Washington thought these tendencies the most formidable of all the dangers to the country, and invoked what he termed of "primary importance" the establishment of schools that our politics might be "the will of the nation, digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests." Jefferson fought against what he called personal corruption, men using the power of office to reward private friends. Jackson brazenly made this form of selfishness the mark of democratic government and gave to the naturally honorable and dignified word "politics" a stink that never has entirely left it. Clamoring politicians seeking office for themselves drove Wm. Henry Harrison to his grave. Political generals desiring places for friends. more than victories in the field were Lincoln's greatest trial. McKinley fretted over Penrose's insistence on the appointment of a shipkeeper at $2.50 a day. Personal patronage, one of the curses of royal courts our new nation expected to avoid, is listed by superintendents as high up in the list of impediments to progress. The first school meeting I ever attended was a celebration of twenty-five years of service of a venerable old man. The whiteness of his hair, the purity of his face, the modesty of his manner, were winsome indeed. In his speech the old reprobate declared, "Never a poor wiodw, never an orphan, never an unfortunate appealed to me but I got her a place in the public schools." (Applause.) Our superintendents, wishing to realize the function of education as a prime political, that is, civic, force attempt acquaintance with men engaged in other lines of public ser |