The Vitalized School

Table of

ily find a definition for teaching school. Much of the criticism of the work of the schools emanates from sources that have a restricted concept of life. The artisan who defines life in terms of his own trade is impatient with much that the school is trying to do. He would have the scope of the school narrowed to his concept

trary. Life is the common heritage of people young and old, and the school should be so organized and administered as to teach people how to use this heritage to the best advantage both for themselves and for others. If a child should be absent from school altogether, or if he should be incarcerated in prison from his sixth to his eighteenth year, he

umber of reactions to objectives. These reactions may be increased by training. Two persons, in passing a shop-window, may not see the same objects; or one may see twice as many as the other, according to their ability to react. The man wh

of feeling. In such an experience life is intense. If a mental or spiritual cyclometer could be used in such a case, it would make a high record of speed. Life sometimes touches bottom, and sometimes scales the heights. But the distance between these extremes varies greatly in different persons. The life of

n a quiet home, where a mother soothes her baby to sleep, where there is no competition but, rather, a sublime monopoly. Again, it manifests itself in the clanking of machinery where men are tunneling the mountain or constructing a canal to unite oceans; or, again, in the laboratory where the microscope is revealing the form o

n write other books trying to explain their meaning. Then, still others divide and subdivide, and science becomes the sciences, and mathematics becomes arithmetic, and algebra, and geo

nd heart. In these revelations we sometimes hear the rippling of the brook, and sometimes the moan of the sea; sometimes the cooing of the dove, and sometimes the scream of the eagle; sometimes the bleating of the lamb, and sometimes the roaring of the

manifestation of life. Literature is what it is because these men were what they were. They saw and felt life to be large and so wrote it down large; and because they wrote it thus, what they wrote endures. They stood upon the heights and saw the

ective of all our activities. And, as has been already said, we are teaching life by the laboratory method. We are striving to interpret the thing in which we are immersed. We feel, and think, and aspire, and love, and enjoy. All these are life; and from this life we are

e could detach history from life, it would cease to be history. If literature is not life, it is not literature; and so with the sciences. These branches are but variants or branches of life, and all emanat

ns and

ool teacher" and a "man or

children "life of a better quality and more abundant": play; revitalized curric

nd ideal educational principles: "More abundant life r

school organization, instruction, and discipline, in order that the

y to teachers and pupils, as a means of dete

ife, while the author maintains that "school is life." Is

ept affect the work of the teac

n will best harmonize with