A Schoolmaster in the Great City
A Schoolmaster in the Great City Angelo Patri
Many parents believe that this is education. They covet knowledge, book knowledge for their children. Rich and poor alike want their children done up in little packages, ready to show, ready to boast of. They fear freedom, they fear to let the child grow by himself. Because the parents want this sort of thing, the school is built to suit ? a book school ? one room like another, one seat like another, each child like his neighbour.
Patri as example of ethnographic research The problems of my school, therefore, loomed up as the problems of our community. The transfers of our teachers and of our children, the equipment of the building, the curriculum, were not only school problems but community problems. Unless the people knew about and shared in the education of their children the schools would be inefficient. To save the school and the home from becoming cloistered, self centred, the culture of children would have to be a co-operative effort between the people and the teachers. Some of the parents invited the teachers to their homes and the teachers went. The teachers invited the parents to school and some of the parents came. Now and then the teacher was asked to the pupil’s birthday party, to mother’s anniversary, or to a feast day celebration.
In and out the web was woven. Here and there children, teachers and parents became more intimate, more friendly. The school world that had been sufficient within itself opened up its doors; a little at first, but as the days passed more and more.
We are all preachers by nature. We get an idea
and at once believe it is the most important idea in the world. Then like true reformers we launch into the campaign.
The danger of an adult association, however, lies not in this pushing enthusiasm of its members. The real danger comes when the association grows into a static, fixed, unyielding thing, itself a system. Parents’ Associations in the city are not apt to be static. They are more apt to be fluid. They are with you one year and away the next. There is always a group coming in and a group going out. They are always making mistakes, the natural mistakes of beginners. Their work is a constant challenge to the intelligence and patience of the school. Dealing with parents in the interest of children has always seemed to me like handling a dynamic factor, one that puts power and soul into the hands of the teacher because it puts power and soul into the people. Socialising the school means humanising the teacher.
Each month ten thousand children, men, women of all ages, went in and out of the settlement house. Music, drawing, sewing, civic clubs, athletic clubs,
literary clubs, occupied all the space there was. Michael and his mother were there. So were the Flannigans and their group. We looked upon the settlement as a moving, living force whose idea was one of service and not of power. Free from tradition, we felt that it would be the neighbourhood social experimental station, finding out, working out, and then beginning again, never stopping long enough to standardise. We felt it would always be open hearted because it prided itself on the bigness of the new opportunities. Through it the people would be drawn together more closely and neighbourhood idealism result. It gave us the hope that some day the school itself would be a bigger thing than it had ever been before.
We had carried the school out of its four walls and the school had been touched by the breath of reality, humanity. Socialising the school had humanised it.
We must keep the three R’s, but they must change with the changing social needs. They must keep pace with the world, and in fact a little ahead of the practical world so that they will be dynamic. Constantly they must be in touch with the strong life currents about the child, the factory, the mill, the shop, the market, the store, the garden, the home.
The educational reformer usually starts his reform by projecting an ideal school. He does this in answer to what he believes the best parent, usually the well-to-do parent, wants, for his children. The reformer starts by carefully selecting the factors that go to make up the life of the school. He builds the plant, selects the children and the teachers and lays out the work to be done. He tries to make his school distinctive, the only one of its kind.
Can the system learn a lesson from the private school and the educational reformer?
What the school system needs to understand is that its strength lies, not in the strength of the central organisation, but in the strength of the individual school, not in making one school like another, but in making each school a distinct unit. The need of the system is the preservation of its units, so that each school can keep itself alive, wide awake, responsive to its people, easily adaptable, the best of its kind.
Before the school site is selected and before the plans are drawn for the building, the neighbourhood in which the school is to be located should be studied, so that the physical equipment of the building will be in conformity with the needs of the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood being regarded as a unit problem, the school should be put in the civic centre of the neighbourhood, where the settlement, the hospital, the church, the library and the playground are. When these are lacking then the school should make provision for some of them at least.
If the school is the most important unit in the whole educational system, the principal and his staff are the most important officials in the system. Principals and teachers should be placed in each school because these principals and teachers are best able to meet the problem of the school. The business of the system should then be to help those in direct touch
2io A Schoolmaster of the Great City
with the school problems, offering plenty of opportunity for growth.
Each individual school needs unity of organisation.
There are school buildings that are used for day schools, night schools, summer schools, music centres, recreation centres, lectures, play centres. All these activities are in one building. All the people come from the same district. All the problems that the varied activities serve are the common group problems. Yet for each activity there is a separate head, each independent of the other and each responsible to its own department head.
The mere physical use of the plant does not mean complete use, definite heading towards a desired end. What is necessary is to make all these activities responsible to one leader so that he may co-ordinate them, permit their interplay. We have all the features of a settlement but without a leader or without a council of leaders. The result is isolation in the very work where there is need of the utmost coordination. Instead of using the people as the focal point for developing school activities, the system imposes a curriculum that the people must follow.
Unless a school enters deeply into the lives of the people, that school will not enter deeply into the lives of the children or into the lives of the teachers. Unless the school is the great democratic socialising agency, it is nothing at all.
The school must open its doors. It must reach out and spread itself, and come into direct contact with all its people. Each day the power of the school must be felt in some corner of the school district. It must work so that everybody sees its work and daily appraises that work. It must put the responsibility on the parent, not so much the individual parent as groups of parents, so that the individual acts or refrains from acting because the group consciousness is at his elbow and not in a distant school, or in an unknown law.