Mankind in the Making

We left the child whose development threads through this discussion ripe to begin a little schooling at the age of five. We have cleared the ground since then of a great number of things that have got themselves mixed up in an illegitimate way with the idea of school, and we can now take him on again through his "schooling" phases. Let us begin by asking what we require and then look to existing conditions to see how far we may hope to get our requirements. We will assume the foundation described in the fourth paper has been well and truly laid, that we have a number of other similarly prepared children available to form a school, and that we have also teachers of fair average intelligence, conscience, and aptitude. We will ask what can be done with such children and teachers, and then we may ask why it is not universally done.

Even after our clarifying discussion, in which we have shown that schooling is only a part, and by no means the major part, of the educational process, and in which we have distinguished and separated the home element in the boarding-school from the schooling proper, there still remains something more than a simple theme in schooling. After all these eliminations we remain with a mixed function and mixed traditions, and it is necessary now to look a little into the nature of this mixture.

The modern school is not a thing that has evolved from a simple germ, by a mere process of expansion. It is the coalescence of several things. In different countries and periods you will find schools taking over this function and throwing out that, and changing not only methods but professions and aims in the most remarkable manner. What has either been teachable or has seemed teachable in human development has played a part in some curriculum or other. Beyond the fact that there is class instruction and an initial stage in which the pupil learns to read and write, there is barely anything in common. But that initial stage is to be noted; it is the thing the Hebrew schoolboy, the Tamil schoolboy, the Chinese schoolboy, and the American schoolboy have in common. So much, at any rate, of the school appears wherever there is a written language, and its presence marks a stage in the civilizing process. As I have already pointed out in my book "Anticipations," the presence of a reading and writing class of society and the existence of an organized nation (as distinguished from a tribe) appear together. When tribes coalesce into nations, schools appear. This first and most universal function of the school is to initiate a smaller or greater proportion of the population into the ampler world, the more efficient methods, of the reading and writing man. And with the disappearance of the slave and the mere laborer from the modern conception of what is necessary in the state, there has now come about an extension of this initiation to the whole of our English-speaking population. And in addition to reading and writing the vernacular, there is also almost universally in schools instruction in counting, and wherever there is a coinage, in the values and simpler computation of coins.