Edue P 212.1 Educ 7 168, 2 229.35.5 V.21 1901-02 HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION LIBRARY Three Interesting Children's Books Lolami, the Little Cliff-Dweller Wagner Stories of our English Grandfathers The Public-School Publishing Company, of Bloomington, Illinois, are taking great care in the choice of matter for additions to their supplementary Reading Books. The three new books announced are especially attractive and valuable for this use and for the general reader as well. The story of Lolami, the Little CliffDweller, touches an ancient order of things belonging to our own country. The lives and customs of the cliff-dwellers of New Mexico and Arizona, their houses, and the topography of the country in which they lived are all pictured in connection with the little Lolami's life of courage and perseverance. His is the story of the winning of life from nature single handed, but it differs from the Robinson Crusoe life in two important ways: it is the life of a child, and it presents the mastery of life as the natural interest of man and not as an imposed penance for early iniquities. The author is Mrs. Clara Kern Bayliss. A teacher who has used the book writes: "The healthy interest in the simple life of this lonely child and his intelligent dog conquers history, geography, language, and expression for the pupils." A principal writes: "The teachers read and tell the story to the children. They discuss the problems that Lolami had to solve, and much of their constructive work and other forms of expression grow naturally out of the story. I like it very much." The price of the school edition, illustrated and bound in cloth, is 50 cents. A library edition on heavy antique paper, is 70 cents. The Wagner Opera Stories is by Grace Edson Barber. Elizabeth Harrison, of the Chicago Kindergarten College, writes the introduction to this book. She says: "I know of no finer illustration of how to handle the great myth-treasures of the race than that shown by Miss Barber in the simple retelling of some of the old legends which finally culminated by setting the soul of Richard Wagner on fire." This book was issued early in June, and is illustrated with beautiful half-tone pictures, printed on heavy paper with extra wide margins and daintily bound in cloth. Price, 50 cents. Stories of Our English Grandfathers, is by George P. Brown. It will fill a need for an interesting story of the growth of the English people toward free government and of the development of industrial life. The slow growth of those principles of free government, which are the fundamental laws of our own nation, and which came to be finally established as constitutional law in England, is best appreciated through these stories of different times. This book is not designed as a text-book, but as a supplementary reader for the grades before beginning the careful study of United States History. The book will be issued soon and will be well illustrated and bound in cloth. Price, 60 cents. Superintendents and teachers, when considering the matter of additional reading in their schools, should write us. We will submit books for examination at any time for all the grades from the second to the seventh. For full descriptive catalogues of our books address The Public-School Publishing Company BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS SCHOOL AND HOME EDUCATION. VOL. XXI. SEPTEMBER, 1901. No. 1 THE ISOLATION OF THE SCHOOL: HOW IT HINDERS AND BY DR. WILLIAM T. HARRIS. One of the earliest points at which educational reform begins to attack whatever it finds to be established as the order of school education for its day is the isolation of the work of instruction and discipline from the home life of the child. There is a separation more or less abrupt between the occupations within the home and those in the school. There is a contrast in manner of behavior; the school expects a degree of self-restraint on the part of the child, a considerate attention to the demands of the task before him, not only as to its demands upon him, but also as to its demands on his fellow pupils and on his teachers. He leaves behind him in the home a certain spontaneity of action and becomes self-repressive and sometimes painfully conscious of all his little impulses and tendencies. He must inhibit such action as will interfere with the grand purpose of the school. In his six years of life he has already accumulated a stock of interests that relate to the members of his family and the possessions of his household. He has supplemented this by experience in his neighborhood and discovered very much that goes to supply wants or needs in the stock of interests in his own home. At the age of six he enters the school and commences to study letters and numbers as his chief business. The school seems bent on changing him from an ear-minded person to an eyeminded person-from one to whom language consists only of spoken words heard by the ear to one for whom language consists of printed or written words, or of characters such as the Arabic notation furnishes. All his home and neighborhood interests are set aside in the school room, or at least subordinated to new disciplines of a comparatively abstract character. For reading and writing deal with arbitrary characters conventionally used to represent not words, but sounds. The child knows words by ear, but he has no theory of elementary sounds; they are not observed by him, because he does not get so far as to analyze his words. Letters, printed or written, and also the sounds that they represent, are alike strange objects to the child. But eye-mindedness will mean to the child the possibility of holding the word with such a firm grip that he can think more precisely than he can with words known orally, but not visually. It will mean that he can get beyond his merely colloquial vocabulary of a few hundred words of a loose and uncertain meaning, and master new vocabularies invented by poets to express all the shades of feeling and character that human nature is capable of, and other new VOcabularies invented by specialists in science to collect and combine all the facts that man knows about nature and man. *An address delivered July 8, to the National Council of Education, at Detroit. 2 SCHOOL AND HOME EDUCATION. Civilization depends on the written and printed word. It has long appeared to be a necessity of society that the child should go to school, just for the sake of becoming eye-minded. But the work of the school is very different from the occupation of the child in the family in his first six years. It is isolated from the home life, and only refers to it incidentally for illustrations and examples; for applications and rudimentary experiences that help him to understand the lesson of the day. Whenever a topic comes up in school that relates in any way to the child's experience, the good teacher always appeals to this body of original observation as a sort of apperception fund of information— a fund of direct information which helps explain the subject presented in the school lesson. So, too, the kindergarten has been invented, and a series of games and occupations offered to younger children as a method to connect more closely the school and the home. But the child does not find the home-life continued in the kindergarten-not the home life of caprice and wild play. He has come into a social whole and he must conform to the regulations necessary for the existence of a social whole. He must play the game chosen by the teacher and work at the occupation set for his class. Everything is prescribed for him. His occupations are not such as he has seen at home. They deal with elements that enter certain processes of manufacture that exist in his neighborhood, but they are almost as abstract as the letters used to spell words. This fact has been well observed by educational reformers, and Pedagogy has received the fruits of their first labors to improve its methods. The isolation of the school from the home life is made less by turns of skill [September, in methods of instruction, or in methods of discipline; by inventions of a long series of short steps and easy gradients that place it within the power of the child to climb to difficult heights. Were the child taken from the home entirely and kept in the school room constantly it would pretty effectually quench. what the child had acquired of individuality in home life. This has been a great evil in a certain class of boarding schools and in orphan asylums. But, as a fact, the ordinary primary school takes only five hours of the day, five days of the week, and forty weeks of the year. This gives one-ninth of the entire time to the school room. If the child consumes four-ninths of the time in sleep and four-ninths of the time in continuing his home and neighborhood life, he will have, in the average case, sufficient elasticity to react against the cramp which is threatened by school life. The concentration of mind on the part of the professional teacher to invent means to lessen the step from home life to school life has tended to make him lose sight of the educative value of what is peculiar to the school itself. The school is sometimes regarded as a sort of necessary evil which it would be well to eliminate entirely from society if a suitable substitute could be found. Sometimes, too, it comes to seem as if the home life of the child contained all that is truly desirable. The one who holds this point of view is prone to fall into the same error in regard to the state. He will think that the family should be all in all, and that the state-that is to say, the political life of the people, should be dispensed with, and thereby an enormous saving effected in the life of man. Something of this trend of thought in modern pedagogy is found on a large scale in the thought of Europe in the last |