1926 should be as extensive as that required of senior high school teachers. This provision shall not be retroactive. V. THE TEACHING LOAD 6. The total number of forty-minute periods of classroom instruction given by any teacher of academic subjects shall not exceed thirty per week; nor shall the number of periods taught by any teacher of non-academic subjects exceed thirtysix per week. 7. The total number of periods of classroom instruction given by any teacher of academic subjects in a school having some definite plan of supervised study should not exceed twenty-five per week; nor should the number taught by any teacher of non-academic subjects exceed thirty per week. 8. The maximum number of pupils assigned daily to any teachers of academic subjects should not exceed 210. 9. The number of pupils per teacher based upon the average daily attendance should not exceed 25. VI. PROGRAM OF STUDIES 10. The appropriate subjects to be offered by the junior high school are: English, mathematics, foreign language, history and civics, geography and elementary science, music, art, health education, vocational information, and practical arts for both boys and girls, including commercial subjects. II. The program of studies shall be organized into a single curriculum with imited electives. (a) Electives prior to the second semester of the 8th year are considered ill advised. Prior to this semester, exploraion and review of subject matter should be provided by the content of courses and he administration of the curriculum, and not by electives. 12. Instruction shall be departmentalzed. 13. The school shall practice flexible romotion rather than promotion by ubject. (a) Flexible promotion means that pupils shall be promoted when the occasion arises and without restriction of subject promotion. It means pupil placement. It implies the use of opportunity classes and coaching teachers. 14. The school shall provide within the school day for pupil club and social activities under the direction of the faculty. 15. The school shall provide adequately for keeping in contact with the homes and home life of the pupils and introduce only gradually the freedom in discipline characteristic of the senior high school. 16. The school shall place at least as much emphasis upon the supervision of study as it does on recitation. VII. ARTICULATION WITH THE SENIOR 17. The completion of the course in a standard junior high school shall admit the pupil to full standing in a standard three-year senior high school. 18. Upon completion of the junior high school course the pupils shall be placed in any grade of any given subject in the three-year senior high school for which he is prepared. 19. The standard three-year senior high school shall offer such ninth-year courses as may be necessary to provide adequately for pupils who may need such courses after they have been promoted to the senior high school, but such courses shall not constitute a part of the senior high school curriculum. 20. In special cases pupils may be promoted to the senior high school prior to the completion of the junior high school course when it is evident that the best interests of the pupils are thus served. VIII. RECOGNITION 21. Recognition by the Association should not be confused with "accrediting" since "recognition" is for the sole purpose of giving official assurance that a certain junior high school satisfies the standards as defined by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. E EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION By WILLARD C. GORE, Department of Education, DUCATION has proved to be a fertile field for shibboleths—from 'self-activity' to 'project,' from 'correlation' to 'platoon.' If experimental work in education continues to gain ground at the present rate, we may expect to find 'experiment' and 'laboratory' the interchangeable countersigns of the elect. Let it be regarded as the proper thing to experiment in teaching and nearly everybody will be doing it. Nor is this so out of reason as it may at first appear. Not only etymologically but psychologically experiment is closely related to our common heritage, experience. Finding out what things are like, savoring the qualities of things, trying things on to see how they will work, being curious, drawing inferences-these are familiar traits of both experiment and experience. Anybody who is capable of having an experience may go so far as to claim the privilege of making an experiment. Much as we may deplore the blurring of useful distinctions, the experimentalist may well afford to acknowledge, and even to dwell upon, the community of spirit which exists between clear cut experimental work in a science and the typical features of all experience-the matrix of the sciences and the arts. Dewey has pointed out with exceptional clearness in his "How We Think" how closely the mental reactions of children approach those of the scientist in their unjaded curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry. If all may not rejoice in the possession of unspoiled minds, such as a normal child and a scientist manifest, we may nevertheless find a common meeting place and point of departure in what we call the facts of experience. Not only what we attempt, what we inquire into, but what happens to us, what we undergo, as our world changes or moves on, gives us our sense of reality, at once common and unique. With reference to conditions in the schools, to come to our subject, many of us could bear witness to an environment crowded and confused, to shifting and conflicting currents, to forces and influences obscure yet powerful, to waste of valuable material, to glimpses of lofty idealism obscured by industrial smoke; chaos and drifting calm, progress and stagnation; cosmic weather a vast interplay of forces industrial, political, climatic and spiritual. "The hungry generations tread us down.” Some, no doubt, rejoice in the sense of life and power which the thronged environment affords. This is the emotional reaction. One administrative school man of my acquaintance always seems particularly happy and at home in his element when, to use one of his favorite expressions, it is fairly "seething" with activity; thus with cherubic calm he rides the storm while humanity boils about him. A chemist by training, it has been suggested that the "seething" pleasantly reminds him of his laboratory days when he used to pour things into test tubes and crucibles and watch them bubble. What I wish to suggest is that in the experience that many of us have of public school work in such a community as this there is a stimulus to experiment, not because we like the particular forms which this environment takes, but because we believe it to be like other environments that seethe and bubble and that have re sponded almost incredibly to experimental inquiry and control. What is involved in the development of scientific experimental work work in in the schools? By way of defining the problem further I submit the following theses, or *Read before the Chicago Pedagogical Club, Apri 5, 1924. suggestions, for your criticism: I. Science never works by wholesale methods. It distrusts uniformity of procedure. The most superficial examination of a small portion of the records of any physical science will show a vast array of specific and highly varied subjects of investigation. Specialization is the necessity of experimental work. II. The earlier developments of scientific work are carried on by pioneers-men of vision and courage who could work alone and stand alone, though often at a cost which subsequent students have good reason to deplore. There is a long roll of such pioneers. As the value of highly specialized research is more and more generally appreciated, a number of ways of reinforcing the individual scientist and correlating highly specialized results have been worked out. Organizations, journals, endowments, libraries, laboratories, and other institutional resources are increasingly and unreservedly placed at the disposal of specialized research in the physical sciences. Scandalously less so in the case of the social and educational sciences. One of the pressing administrative problems in the schools is that of recognizing, reinforcing, and co-ordinating the work of those who are attacking special problems experimentally. III. In a public school system there should be certain schools designated as laboratory schools. Such school should undertake experiments of a more radical or costly character. It is important to have certain carefully controlled experiments tried out in a few schools, so that there would not have to be so much fool experimenting done on all the children in all the schools. IV. Experimental teaching should not be confined to the laboratory schools. In every school there should be opportunities for properly trained persons to carry on experimental work-especially on some specific problem. Experimental work does not mean everybody teaching as one pleases. It means more thorough obser vation of relevant conditions, more careful weighing of evidence, more severe criticisms of procedure. Science means the maximum of responsibility and control as well as the maximum of freedom and initiative. In a certain school noted for the experimental spirit that pervades much of the work, I was taken by the principal into a first grade room to see something of the methods used by an expert teacher of reading. There was a trolley arrangement for displaying and varying word groups, together with other mechanical devices very ingenious which I saw but imperfectly in the brief time at my disposal. Then I was taken to another first grade room. "This teacher," said the principal, "has an entirely different way of teaching reading." It was the hospitality of mind exhibited by the principal that struck me forcibly. Instead of deploring, as some might have done, diversity of procedure in so important a matter as the teaching of reading, this principal was exulting in the fact that two capable teachers were each attacking the problem in a widely different manner, affording an interesting opportunity to compare results and perhaps to discover something new. If these two procedures were to be checked up with something like quantitative accuracy as to their results, here was an instance of genuine scientific experimentation. V. The example just referred to suggests two or three further propositions. 1. In a school, not primarily a laboratory school, there may be a spirit friendly to experimental teaching. Two considerations might be borne in mind: (a) the inquiry must be restricted, specific-not too broad or vague. vague. Encourage the following up of some lead which may perhaps at first seem insignificant, rather than undertake too ample or ambitious a project. (b) Encourage keeping on with an investigation, measuring results, evaluating the procedure, seeing it through, if there be any reasonable possibility of discovering something new; for the press of conventionally required work lies heavy on most of us most of us at times and threatens to beat down and bury the more specialized and original thing that was beginning to spring up and look promising. 2. The rapidly growing arsenal of educational measurements finds an essential place in the measuring of results of experimental teaching. The fact that in many phases of teaching a teacher has available a more trustworthy technique for evaluating results than ever before is itself a stimulus to devise or try out new methods. Indeed the new power given by this technique is so fascinating to exercise, that it has been misused, in some cases, I believe, more securely to entrench outworn traditional subject-matter and methods, rather than to serve educational progress. Standardized tests in the three R's, for example, do not work either automatically or by magic to improve instruction in these subjects. They may be used as effective trench tools in digging these subjects in, as well as implements for turning up new soil. Simply to measure a value does not necessarily alter the value measured. To determine the existing speed and accuracy, say, of third grade children in certain arithmetical processes may be nothing more than a scientific curiosity, or it may arouse curiosity. It is an elaborate form of begging the question if anything in the way of a standard of control is supposed to be determined. We learn, through the achievement test, how the thing is being done upon the whole; not how it should be done. Measurements conduce neutrally and equally to the stabilizing of the traditional as well as to the control of further progress. Externally imposed scientific technique is a contradiction in terms for true scientific technique sustains the most intimate relations with the specific problem in process of development and solution. But educational practice has had so little of the spirit of scientific research in its make-up, that it has been an easy mark for exploitation under the guise of the so-called scientific study of education. The study and development of the technique of experiment and of measurement has a legitimate satisfaction of its own. The recent book on "How to Experiment in Education" by Professor W. A. McCall appears to be largely an academic case in point. The unconscious humor of the book is perhaps its most appealing characteristic. This effect I cannot hope to reproduce for you, for it would take too long to set forth the elaborate and highly artificial symbolism of logic and mathematics which supplies the ritual of the author's devotions to science. These are some of the problems for investigation analyzed in the concluding chapter of the book. "Problem 5. Which is better for Pupil Growth, a Temperature of 68° and a Humidity of 50 per cent, or a Temperature of 86° and a Humidity of 80 per cent?" Here is a little of the jargon which learnedly follows: "Either the rotation. or equivalent-groups method may be employed, though the rotation method is preferable perhaps. Several test types covering the work of the pupils will be needed. These may be tests of general reading ability, arithmetical ability, spelling ability, and the like. In this case, the experiment will need to continue for a considerable period." You wonder how long children must be subjected to a temperature of 86° and a humidity of 80 per cent in the interests of science, or what would be left of them at the end of a "a considerable period." "Problem 13. What Effect in Securing Order will a Beautiful Picture Placed in Front of a Room Have Upon an Unruly Boy who Loves Art?" You may be relieved to learn that, "The one-group method or rotation method is the most feasible, owing to the difficulty of equating unruly boys who love art." "Problem 15. Which will give Better Results in Baking, to Put Angel-food Cake into a Gas Oven Just Lighted or into One of Medium Temperature?" "One-group method or rotation will not do. Since the S is a set of angel-food cakedough it could not very well be baked twice." (Isn't 'Science' wonderful!) "Problem 21. In a Recitation, Can a Class of Girls Bluff a Teacher More Easily Than a Class of Boys?" "EF is a class of girls. EF2 is an equivalent class of boys. S is the teacher, or, better, several teachers of both sexes, since an experiment of this sort needs repetition on both men and women teachers. "The rotation method is most appropriate, because it permits the experimenter to rotate out differences in nature of lesson, teacher's experience in teaching it and the like. Thus an experimenter can request a teacher to teach a specific lesson to a class of girls, and then to teach this same lesson to a class of generally equivalent boys. Next he can ask the teacher to teach another lesson to both boys and girls, only, in this case, the boys should be taught first and the girls second. "While each lesson is being taught or afterward, the experimenter must measure the amount of bluffing which occurs. The C [change produced in S] may be treated as identical with this F. T., [final test] so that a regular rotation computation model will apply." Pre-occupation with a phase of experimental technique is clearly the complaint with which Professor McCall's book is afflicted. This is a natural and quite likely a rewarding phase. Everything pertaining to the logic of science is accounted for in Professor McCall's treatment, except intellectual curiosity, reflective thinking, imagination, the feeling of value and interest in a problem, the spirit of inquiry. The forms of science are in evidence, but its essence and spirit have flown. Let me emphasize again the point that I am not trying to do justice to the logic of experiment which Professor McCall sets forth in this book, much of it familiar to students of logic and deserving of serious minded cultivation. What the book accentuates, however, is the gap between this experimental technique and the experience of those who are carrying the work of teaching in the schools. This is the dualism between those who cultivate the forms of science and those who are close to the substance of experience. The substance of experience is not experimental science; but it is the possibility of experimental science. Forms of science cut loose from experience die; and, like all dead forms, cannot be made to live again, save through a process of dissolution and re-birth. Experience in teaching is often experience arrested on the level of blind routine, fixed and rigid habits, dogmatic, domineering, school-mastering methods; but not necessarily so, if the testimony of experience in other fields be taken into account. Out of the curiosity and wonder, the doubt and uncertainty of some specific phase of experience, out of further observation of data, out of suggestions, guesses, hypotheses, out of testing of hypotheses and interpreting of results, as these all become more consciously and more flexibly developed, growing experience becomes fruitful experiment. 3. By way of contrast let us turn to the recent book on "An Experiment with a Project Curriculum" by Professor Ellsworth Collings.* I think it could be proved that this book which recounts an experiment in curriculum-making in a rural school in Missouri extending over a period of four years is the most significant combination of teaching experience and experimental technique that has yet been published. I shall not attempt to prove this statement, believing that the reading of the book itself would render *An Experiment with a Project Curriculum. By Ellsworth Collings, with an Introduction by William H. Kilpatrick. New York. The Macmillan Company, 1923. |