Adjusting the School to the Child
Practical First Steps.
- Author:
Carleton Wasliburne.
Superintendent of Schools, Winnetka, 111., U.S.A. Harrap & Co. 7/6. This is an issue in this country of the American edition of the book describing what is usually known here as the “Winnetka System,” though the author disclaims any intention of setting up anything so fixed as a ” System
The book describes not only the basic principles which have for seventeen years underlain the work of the schools in Winnetka, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago, but also gives details of the processes of individualising the school subjects, which will form the principal interest for readers of this Journal.
Teachers who wish to break away from class methods of teaching to something freer, which will draw upon those sources of non-academic interest which are often found in even the dullest children, are often attracted to project methods in which children of varying capacities co-operate in carrying out some investigation or making some model or in some way learning by doing. They are, however, sometimes deterred from using the good in these methods by the expressions of their more uncompromising advocates, from which one might gather that no other form of teaching was necessary, for they cannot see how a child can do without drill in the fundamentals. On the other hand, there are those who claim that because a backward child is weak on his fundamentals, he, should be given practically nothing except individual work, with apparatus and books, until he has reached a certain level of proficiency, and can then go on to the studies of content, such as literature, history, and so forth.
The Winnetka ” System ” ought to have something to teach both. Briefly, Washburne recognizes not only the need for concentrated individual work on the minimum essentials, facts, skills, processes, but also the need for situations in which the child can use his acquisitions, while seeing their bearing upon life, and learning to co-operate with his fellows. The Winnetka child spends a portion of each day in individual work in arithmetic, reading, spelling and social science facts, and the rest upon group activities in the social sciences, music, art, craft, assembly, drama, etc.
A large part of the book is taken up with very detailed descriptions of the technique of individual work. It is now acknowledged that no teacher can keep a class of children working profitably by themselves unless he has a proper system?material prepared in ad vance, records of past achievement, test material. Willingness is not enough; there must be technique, and of this every teacher could learn from these pages : there is much sound good sense amid a wealth of words, and teachers on the look-out for ” tips ” may Pick these up, even if they cannot adapt their work in a more thorough-going way ! Some of the topics dealt with are : the mastery of the addition, subtraction and multiplication combinations, testing what a child has learned before requiring him to revise “, the prevention of failure rather than its cure, and the order of difficulty of arithmetical processes. Would that more teachers of dull children would heed the.
sentence : ” When a child has read at least four or five easy books he is ready for phonics ” ! There is great emphasis on the need for the use of tests of achievement. Unfortunately we have little to help us here except the pioneer (and somewhat old) work of Burt and Ballard. There is a need for the production of more tests on this side of the Atlantic.
While much of the detail is applicable directly only to American conditions, any teacher who is willing to puzzle out the meaning of the text will find much which can be adapted to conditions in this country. In this connection it should be remembered that the American ” grades” are roughly comparable with our old ” standards ” with a change of one figure, i.e., Grade 2 equals Standard 1, and that “recitation” has nothing to do with elocution.
There is a chapter on school administration which deals with admissions, records, the vexed question of placing a child by age or attainment, and time table making; and a valuable section on teacher training after college, which might have inspired the conferences of teachers of special classes in Leicester.
The chapter on the behaviour of the individual child and the application of the principles of mental hygiene to it, contains nothing new, but gives some examples of the good results of teachers’ attempts to adjust difficult children.
The book is worth reading both by students of education who wish to have details of the Winnetka system without hunting for them in periodicals, and by teachers who are not content with slipshod attempts to import ” interest ” into the curriculum at the expense of thoroughness. J.L.
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