First Lessons: A Report on Elementary Education in AmericaPrepared by the former U.S. Secretary of Education and the Elementary Education Study Group. Covers: children, parents and the community of adults; our elementary schools: 3They teach us wonderful things2 (reading, writing, mathematics, science, social studies, the arts, foreign languages, health and physical education, computers, libraries): elementary school professionals; school policy (standards, resources, discipline, drugs, class size, kindergarten, the gifted child, textbooks, language-minority children); and in the schools. Extensive bibliography. |
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Page 25 - The conclusion is reached that learning to read and write should be the leading study of the pupil in his first four years of school. Reading and writing are not so much ends in themselves as means for the acquirement of all other human learning. This consideration alone would be sufficient to justify their actual place in the work of the elementary school.
Page 57 - It is of course understood by your Committee that the substantial moral training of the school is performed by the discipline rather than by the instruction in ethical theory. The child is trained to be regular and punctual, and to restrain his desire to talk and whisper — in these things gaining self-control day by day.
Page 17 - I met with several kinds of associations in America, of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it.
Page 27 - To say that a fact is significant in science, is to say that it helps to establish or refute some general law; for science, though it starts from observation of the particular, is not concerned essentially with the particular, but with the general. A fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance. In this the scientist differs from the artist, who, if he deigns to notice facts at all, is likely to notice them in all their particularity. Science, in its ultimate ideal, consists of a set of...
Page 28 - Natural science claims a place in the elementary school not so much as a disciplinary study side by side with grammar, arithmetic, and history, as a training in habits of observation and in the use of the technique by which such sciences are expounded.
Page 13 - ... requirement of the civilization into which the child is born, as determining not only what he shall study in school, but what habits and customs he shall be taught in the family before the school age arrives, as well "as that he shall acquire a skilled acquaintance with some one of a definite series of trades, professions; or vocations in the years that follow school; and, furthermore, that this question of the relation of the pupil to his civilization determines what political duties he shall...
Page 21 - The branches to be studied, and the extent to which they are studied, will be determined mainly by the demands of one's civilization. These will prescribe what is most useful to make the individual acquainted with physical nature and with human nature so as to fit him as an individual to perform his duties in the several institutions— family, civil society, the state, and the Church.
Page 24 - The selections are literary works of art possessing the required organic unity and a proper reflection of this unity in the details, as good works of art must do. But they portray situations of the soul, or scenes of life, or elaborated reflections, of which the child can obtain some grasp through his capacity to feel and think, although in scope and compass they far surpass his range. They are adapted, therefore, to lead him out of and beyond himself, as spiritual guides.
Page 62 - ... which ought to be promoted from the primary schools. It has happened in such cases that this superstition prevailed so far that the pupils in the primary school building were kept at work on studies already finished, because they could not be transferred to the grammar school. In all good school systems the pupils take up new work when they have completed the old, and the bright pupils are transferred to higher classes when they have so far distanced their fellows that the amount of work fixed...
Page 32 - But it is believed that the distinctively human interest connected with geography in the first years of its study should not yield to the purely scientific one of physical processes until the pupil has taken up the study of history. The educational value of geography, as it is and has been in elementary schools, is obviously very great.