The New Education

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e of the similar questions which people interested in educational progress are asking themselves, arise out of the process of transition that is seemingly one of the fundamental propositions of the universe. All things change, and

crust. Next week the black earth is striped with rows of green. Onions, beets, lettuce, and peas are coming up. Go back to the hills which you climbed in boyhood, ascend their chasmed sides and note how even they have changed. Each year some part of them has disappeared into the rapid torrent. Had you been there in April, you might have seen particles of y

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he proceeds of slavery. To-day machines replace men in a thousand industries. To-morrow slavery is called into question, until in the dim-glowering nineteenth century, men will struggle and die by tens of thousands;-on the one side, those who believe tha

scence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on into the maturity of life. How vain is our hope that the child may remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay he

one age, sinks into the insignificance of desuetude in the age which follows. Thus does the inevitable come to pass. Thus does the social institution, wrought through centuries of turmoil and anguish, become useless in the newer civilization which is arising on every

reshape the institutions which the past has bequeathed to it. These modified institutions, handed on in turn

ng Up wit

for ages, progressive movements seem wholly dead, and the path to the future is overgrown with tradition, and blocked by oblivion and decay. The rapid adv

in an age of individualized industry and governmental non-interference, and now faces a n

men of the eighteenth century made political institutions, and were content with democracy; the men of the nineteenth century, accepting government as it stood, built up a new industry. The society which we in the twentieth century must erect upon t

the ideas of the new generation are moulded, tempered, and burnished? May we not expect that in its lessons to the

on in the

to the forest and to the meadow; in the care of domestic animals and in the making of small articles of household furniture; in the splitting, sawing, and piling up of wood; in all the work his father's trade or calling involves."[17] In another passage he calls upon parents, "more particularly fathers (for to their special care and guidance the child ripening into boyhood is confided)," to contemplate "their parental duties in child guidance;"[18] and he prefaces this exhortation with a long list of illustrations, sugges

d the New Basi

y, on the one hand, prevent the mechanic from carrying on his trade near his family; and on the other hand, make it impossible

leave their homes for ten, eleven, or even twelve hours a day to carry on their industrial activities; great centers of population collect about the centers of industry; the farm, the flock of geese, the garden, the forest, and the blacksmith shop disappear; food, clothing, and other necessaries of life-formerly the product of home industry-are produc

ring; kite-flying, fishing, hunting, and trapping in summer and autumn. The general farm is a storehouse of use

s, and trolley cars; or else he plays in a public playground in company with hundreds, or even thousands, of other childr

elopment rest than upon the school? On the farm the boy learned his trade, as Froebel suggests, at the hands of his father. The father of the city boy spends his working hours in a mill, or in an office, where boys under fou

replaced the man; semi-skilled and unskilled labor replaced skilled labor; great numbers of men and women, and even of children, crowded together in factories to spin thread, make bolts and washers, weave ribbon, bake bread, manufacture machin

ffice boy, from the boss roller to the yard laborer, from the chief clerk to the stenographer, the work of men and women is monotonous and specialized. The city has grown up as a logical product of an i

ulture. Old methods are brought into question. Intensive study and specialization are widespread. The time has passed when a farmer can afford to neglect the agr

al product of a long series of discoveries and inventions. New methods, bui

tions of life. This is the new basis for education,-this the new foundation upon which must be erected a superstructure of educational opportunity for succeeding gener

TNO

ter originally appeared in

el. Translated by W. N. Halliman, New

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