Produced by Produced from images provided by the Million Book Project
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
A Proposition for Educators
1918
The Bureau of Educational Experiments is a group of men, and women whoare trying to face the modern problems of education in a scientificspirit. They are conducting and helping others to conduct experimentswhich hold promise of finding out more about children as well as howto set up school environments which shall provide for the children'sgrowth. From these experiments they hope eventually may evolve alaboratory school.
Among their surveys the past year, one by Helen Marot has resulted inthis timely and significant book. The experiment which is outlined atthe close seems to the Bureau to be of real moment,—one of which botheducation and industry should take heed. They earnestly hope it may betried immediately. In that event, the Bureau hopes to work with MissMarot in bringing her experiment to completion.
THE BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS, 16 West Eighth Street, New York
City.
A friend of mine in describing the Russian people as he observed themin their present revolution said it was possible for them to acceptnew ideas because they were uneducated; they did not, he said, laborunder the difficulty common among educated people of having to get ridof old ideas before they took on new ones. I think what he had in mindto say that it is difficult to accept new ideas when your mind isfilled with ideas which are institutional. The ideas which come out offormal education, out of the schools, out of books, are ideas whichhave been stamped as the true and important ones; many of them are,as they have proved their worth in service. But as they representauthority, they pass into a people's mind with the full weight ofan accepted fact. The schools, the colleges, and the books arenot responsible primarily for the fixed ideas; every establishedinstitution contributes fixed ideas as well as fixed customs and rulesof action. The schools and colleges circulate and interpret them.The movement for industrial education in the United States is anillustration of this.
The ideas which we find there have not sprung from schools or collegesbut from industry. The institution of industry, rather than theinstitution of education, dominates thought in industrial educationcourses. It is the institution of industry as it has affected the lifeof every man, woman and child, which has inhibited educational thoughtin conjunction with schemes for industrial schools. No establishedsystem of education or none proposed is more circumscribed byinstitutio