The Commonwealth. [volume] (Everett, Wash.) 1911-1914, 1913-02-27
THE EDUCATIONAL MACHINE
Bv Ada c. Baker.

Mans greatest achievement in the
modern age is the machine. The Won
drous creation with its thews and sim
ews of iron and it's motive force of
steam or electricity, had it been possi-
BILE in a more primitive age, would
have been deified Even now it is
an object of worship. We pay homage
in the form of special privileges; we
make human sacrifices to it; we cons
ciously or unconsciously reproduce it
in our institutions; we have govern
mental machinery, church machinery,
educational machinery.
To our educational fore-fathers who
thought of the child's mind as a sheet
of white paper upon which the teacher
might write what he wished, or as
block of marble to be hewn into shape,
education seemed a simple process.
What was more natural then, when
the ever-increasing possibilities of the
machine dawned upon them, than to
apply it's principle to education? So
the pedagogical energy of the nine
teenth century was devoted to the de-
velopment of great system with all
sorts of ingenious contrivances and
processes for informing, Illuminating,
refining and polishing the material up
on which it worked.
Individual differences among the pu-
pills gave but little concern to those
lovers of uniformity and conformity
who elaborated the system. Is one
pupil especially quick? Hold him back,
it is not necessary that he exercise
his full powers. Is another slow to
grasp a subject? Drop him along if
he never gains a firm footing.
To the teachers of hundred years
ago, the modern school with its fine
buildings, it's generous equipment, its
numerous text books, it's diversified
curriculum, it's carefully planned
courses of study and its normal school
and college trained teachers, might
seem almost perfect, the complete
redllZaClOn OF Jnelr luedl.
But today we are not satisfied. On
every hand arise complaints against
our public school system, detailing it's
injuries to the physical, mental and
moral welfare of the pupils. But the
most widespread, the most insistent
complaint is that the school dwarfs
oh ind iXyiHI
His intellectual food is so carefully
prepared and so systematically admin
istered that he has neither time nor
opportunity to use his own resources
The advance in biology and psychol-
ogy has given us new conception OF
education. We no longer regard the
child's mind as a sheet of blank paper,
but as a living organism, acting on
the inward impulses from injured
generations of ancestors and respond
ing to the outward stimuli of a many
sided environment and that well-in-
tentioned efforts to instill so much
arithmetic, so much grammar, so much
patriotism, so much morality, each
day, each month, each year, have be-
come out only absurd, but criminal
From every side comes the demand
to break the lockstep, to give more
I freedom.
Our conception of education has
changed. Why has not our educa-
tional system changed? First and fore
most, because it is the chief bulwark
of existing institutions, as every prom
inent citizen who addresses a gather
ing of school children affirms. There
is little danger that pupils who for
so many years have had their energies
so carefully directed and their think
ing so carefully done for them, will
ever exhibit progressive, much less
revolutionary, tendencies. They be
come average citizens who keep in
the trodden paths On the other hand,
single generation of young people
{ t,..i i.,,9 20 tI7fDI- honestly iudaDpUd-