Modern Educational Methods

Mr. President and Gentlemen,--

I think one of the greatest gifts that America gave to the world was the National School System-free national education. It has long been recognized as the proper thing for the lawyers and doctors, and for the ministers, and later for teachers and engineers, to continue their education after they leave the public or elementary schools. The state has learned that it is wise to aid these men in getting an education in order that they may be able more effectively to do their work of leadership in the nation. The people of Germany, especially in the City of Munich, have, during the last few years, decided that the lawyers, and the doctors, and the ministers, and the teachers, and the engineers are not the only men who should have advanced education given to them, either wholly or partly, at the expense of the state. They have reached the conclusion that every man who works in any department of trade should have, at the expense of the state, a more thorough training, a more advanced education, and so in the City of Munich every boy who leaves school at fourteen-the age at which our boys are allowed to leave the public schools and go to any department of industrial or business life that they choose-has to continue at a trade school for three afternoons of each week, and for three hours each afternoon, making nine hours a week, and keep that up for four years.

He leaves his workshop, whatever it may be, and goes to receive at one of these public trade schools, supported entirely by the municipality of Munich itself, the scientific basis of the trade he has adopted. And not only the scientific basis, but he really applies scientific knowledge to the treating of the particular materials he has to use in his trade. If he chooses the iron trade, or any department of it, for his special department of life-work, he is trained in every process of treating iron according to the most modern and scientific ideas. Every process of colouring the steel, for instance, known to science, electrical, scientific or chemical, is revealed to these young men who are to deal with iron. They are trained to use all kinds of iron in all kinds of ways that they are accustomed to use them in their work in any department of trade;, and not merely the department in which he himself is working or he has chosen for his life-work, but all that can be taught to the young men during the three afternoons per week of the four years, and on Sunday forenoons if they like to go to the lessons which are given. This is a course which by law follows their public school course, and there is no escape. The boy has no choice in the matter. The state says: You are an element of the state, and for the benefit of the state, as well as for your own individual benefit, we propose to make you the most expert workman that it is possible for us to make of you.

I think there is a great deal of force in the attitude which they are taking. Every working-man should be helped to become the best working-man possible. For the benefit of the state, of course, it is manifest that the more scientific be the training of the working-man, and the more thorough the practical application of the science, the greater is the efficiency of these men in adding to the wealth of the country, because the wealth of a manufacturing country, as we are not, is largely produced by taking the inexpensive raw material and adding to its value. The trained working-man, trained in the scientific treatment and in all the modern ideas in regard to the most artistic process of treating the iron, or wood, or leather, or whatever it may be, or adding most to the raw material, is the man that gives it not only a utilitarian value but an artistic value, and the German people, I think, are rapidly driving the rest of the peoples out of the market in artistic manufacture. I could see no part of Germany where I could not see factories-and new factories in many parts-all of them working day and night, and yet they can't keep up with the demand for their productions. And so they are preparing to make each individual man the most effective man possible for the state and for his own development, so that he may be worthy of higher wages, and therefore better qualified to add to the culture .of his own home and all the agencies of culture which he may bring into his home, and in every sens making him a better private individual, while at the same time qualifying him for the most effective work in adding to the wealth of his country.

We have in our country probably as much undeveloped material as in their country, and surely it is of vast importance that we should, as soon as possible, organize our young men and young women so that they get this training-after they leave the regular school if you like. Educate them in the regular school as far as possible, but after they leave there they should get extra training, scientific training, as the basis of the work they are to do in any department of trade they may adopt or industry they may choose, and at the same time get the training that will make them able to produce the most artistic things possible, in order that the raw material of our own country may not be sent away to other countries to be manufactured, because then we get very little out of the value of our raw material. We in our own country should manufacture, not for our own people alone, but for people all over the world. I believe our people are as intelligent as any others. I believe it gives them a higher consciousness of their value to give them this practical scientific training, and it gives them power to deal with the materials they use intelligently and comprehensively.

Of course, in many other parts of Germany other than Munich they are doing advanced work in trade schools, and very advanced work in their higher technical schools, which are probably the most expensive in the world. They are doing it deliberately to qualify the people to be not only industrious and thrifty, but to produce that which is attractive to a very high degree. Some people are afraid that the working-man would not like to have trade schools introduced into Toronto, or introduced into Ontario, or into Canada, but I am quite confident, if the working-man knew the object of trade schools was to qualify his sons and daughters so that they would be more intelligent working men and women, and be able to add more to their own wealth and the wealth of their own country, he would not regard it in any sense as an infringement on the rights of the working-man, or be afraid that it would fill the country with unqualified workingmen, and I believe he would be the warmest supporter of the principle of giving every boy, not merely those who are to be ministers and lawyers and doctors and engineers and teachers, but every boy, the opportunity of obtaining at the expense of the state some additional education to fit him to perform the duties of his life-work.

In England I recently found that during the last thirteen years (it is thirteen years since I was there before) a very great advance had been made in school work. Many very important changes have been made during those thirteen years. The English people have almost entirely got free from the old examination burden and from the old payment by results burden. You know it was the case until only a few years ago that the schools received the amount of Government grant in proportion to the returns made by the Inspector who visited the school. An outside official came and examined every pupil, and reported the standing of every pupil to the Government, and, according to the report that this Inspector gave, the amount of Government grant was increased or reduced, and in England, you possibly all know, the Government grant is a large element in maintaining the schools. The schools are managed very largely from the Central Board in London, and the payments are made to the schools by the Board of Education in London for the whole of England, and the other Board for Scotland and Wales. . These payments formed a very large share of the total amount paid for the support of the schools throughout the country. The municipalities do not bear the main part of the support of the schools as they do in this country, so that it was a matter of very great importance to have a very good report for every individual child. That has, been done away with as near as I have been able to find, and the people of England are beginning to feel free to teach as they ought to teach, not simply to cram the pupils full of knowledge so that they might pass the examination. They tell a story over there about a local teacher, which serves to illustrate that; I won't vouch for the truth of it. A teacher in London was told that a boy who had been at school in her class had died during the night, and she heaved a sigh, as a sympathetic teacher would, and said, " Oh, well, he wouldn't have passed, anyway." The sadness of the death was, reduced considerably.

I think the interest in technical education has developed in England, but the technical schools, magnificent as they are (and I saw several of them in London and Birmingham, and Manchester especially, the mightiest of all the great schools of England), have very few students during the day. The young men who attend them are not compelled to go. It is a matter of voluntary attendance, and the attendance is chiefly at night, when young men are tired. Some people in England objected when I told them about the compulsory attendance at the trade schools of Munich, and said that was rather un-British. I said I think it is rather British, for you compel the children to go to school, you use compulsion with the teachers, you compel every teacher in England in the elementary schools to join the scheme of superannuation--it isn't a matter of choice--and you are very arbitrary in a good many respects, and properly so. If we are to have a national system of schools, the system can be based only on the idea that the system is made national because of the advantage that would come to the nation as a whole. If you force those young fellows in England, who at fourteen years of age go out without any kind of trade and without going into any place where they would learn a trade, and who stay on the streets and sell papers, or some other job of that kind, until they are seventeen and eighteen, and find themselves then without any trade; if you would compel them to go to school, it would certainly be a great advantage to them and the country.

I believe, gentlemen, that the reason we get a poorer type of young man from England than we did twenty years ago is that we are getting those who have not been trained in any trade in the Old Land. In the olden time nearly every boy had to learn some trade or take up some occupation, and matters were entirely different. I find amongst the leaders of England that a good many of them are coming to grapple with that question. The boys who have left the Old Land to a large extent come from towns, and many of them without learning a trade at all of any kind, and when they are eighteen or nineteen there is nothing they can do well--nothing they can do at all up to the standard average intelligence of an Englishman, or a Canadian either, and the people of England are now seeing this to some extent. In fact, two or three members of the Cabinet told me they were going to try to introduce what they call the Charlottenburg system. I tried to get them to introduce the system of Munich and make it broad in its application, and not for the few who voluntarily use it-not for the fellows that are tired out, not for those brave fellows who wish to stay; but I believe the Government of an intelligent nation should know better than a boy of fourteen years of age what is best for him, and should say to that boy, " You must take up a course of training to qualify you for the best expert work in some trade, to make yourself a better individual, and qualify yourself for better work for the nation." I think the intelligence of the boy, and the intelligence of the nation compelling that boy to go to school, would have a very advantageous effect upon his life and character.

The English system expends a great deal of money for technical education, and good results come from it. In their ordinary schools they are away in advance of us in education. They teach art to the students in every department in the training of the boys and girls; but art as applied to the particular district in which they live. The art they teach in Leeds, where the woollen manufacture is the large interest, is not the same art they teach in other parts where woollen manufacture is not the chief interest. While the people of Toronto complain-some of them--that we have one single teacher of art for the whole school system of our city (and there are some people who object to that), I find in Bradford, in a single school, two teachers of art for that school alone. It was one where they had all grades, from the kindergarten to the high school, not a very large attendance, but they regarded the training in art of so vital importance to the people of the city that they give these pupils, both young men and young women, the best artistic training they can. In Edinburgh I found one teacher in a single high school, and in Leeds one, and so on. They pay very much more attention to art, and applied art, than we do in our city. I have pleaded for more here, but some of the people have worked very hard against it, and some of the papers even, and sometimes members of the Board think we should do away with the little we have. We want to train our teachers and our pupils to give our children proper and truer artistic ideals and greater artistic power, and I hope for better results in that direction. England is distinctly ahead of us in that respect.

In the European countries, and especially England--and when I say England I mean England, Scotland and Wales--they are even more in advance of us in regard to the care they take of the physical life of the young people in the schools. They do a great many things we do not do at all. Nearly all the cities have splendid arrangements for training the boys and girls in swimming. Why don't you applaud that? You look as if you had never had a swim yourself. Why, the value of a swim as a physical exercise, to say nothing of the advantage of the health that comes in other respects from swimming, is of immense value. We live, as, I heard a gentleman say, beside a lake, one of the finest in the world, and on a bay which used to be clean enough to swim in. I sent out a circular last year to our larger schools to ask how many of the boys from twelve to sixteen in our schools could swim, and we found a very small percentage; indeed, not ten cent of our boys in Toronto in the schools can swim, and not five percent would claim they could swim one hundred yards. I think that is wrong. That little city of Bradford, smaller than our city, has fourteen public swimming baths, and all the boys and girls of that city are trained to swim in those swimming baths. We have not one yet. I am glad the City Council at the present time is, taking action to give us one, but just think of one swimming bath for over 30,000 children! We ought to have more swimming baths in this city, in which the boys and girls could be trained to swim.

In several of the cities the public schools themselves provide the swimming baths. In London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Nottingham, and Leeds, I saw the boys swim in their own splendid swimming baths under the school, none of them smaller than this room, supplied with water turned on regularly. They have a special trainer, who trains them to swim. I prefer the municipal arrangement rather than have the swimming baths in the basement of the schools. I was glad to find in London, for instance, competitions-champion competitions--for the whole of the city, and I saw the champion boy swimmer of Liverpool swimming in the swimming bath in one of their schools. That is one of the things I think we ought to work for in Toronto, and this club ought to help work to get our city fairly supplied with swimming baths, so that we may train our boys and girls to swim. I would say we should teach them especially to float. We have had so many deaths this summer in our city that need not have occurred at all if the boys had only known how to lie on their backs and float, and they can be trained to float so that they can lie for fifteen hours, just about as easily as one, if they have the proper training. I speak of that as a mere life-saving device, but I am not advocating it simply or chiefly for life-saving. I think it is one of the most splendid exercises for the development of the lungs and chest, and I think. it is also a very excellent habit to give to the boys and girls in our city, many of whom have not a bath-tub at home, and many of whom, according to their mothers' statements, throw on a light undershirt, and then a little heavier one, and then another, and keep the same ones on all winter, and then gradually peel them off when the springtime comes. We are getting thousands of boys every year from Russia and Austria and Bavaria, and recently from Macedonia; thousands of these boys, who have not been trained in habits of health and exercise, and I think we might profitably follow the Old hand in the splendid attention it has given to swimming.

Then they have, of course, in their schools a great deal of physical culture. They have special teachers for physical culture in all the cities which I visited-special teachers for physical culture to train the young people, not merely how to stand and how to move--and that has a great deal to do in developing the character--but to develop their vital organs, the heart and lungs especially, to the fullest degree, and make them capable of sustaining the strain their life may call upon them to sustain. I asked the Board of Education here to appoint a special physical instructor, and it was thrown out, and I think no paper in the city gave any help in getting it. I found in Germany, as well as in England, that this was, practically universal. These things that I speak of may not appeal to some as educational questions, but I think, gentlemen, you will agree that the time is past when the mere storing of the rind with Grammar, Arithmetic, History, or anything else of that kind, should be regarded as the main essential element in the education of a child. They are very good, but surely no culture can take the place of the development of the executive powers and general forces of the child. Modern education is paying a great deal more attention to the training of the child so that he has the initiative power and the transforming power and achieving tendency fostered more than the old ideals, and physical culture is one of the distinct elements in this training.

Another department of physical culture in which we are a little ahead of them is in playgrounds. I think Toronto has no reason to be ashamed at the present of her rank with the other countries of the world in regard to play and playgrounds. We are not ideal. I think we ought to be dissatisfied with what we have. But we have in connection with our public schools a better organization in this regard than I think any city of the world of our size. In England and in Germany they are making very rapid strides, however. Over five hundred public playgrounds have been opened in Germany in the last fourteen years and they are still opening them up very rapidly. We are going to do much more in that way, I am glad to say. I shall not mention the name, but .one distinguished gentleman in this city recently offered me $30,000 to buy a fine play-ground, and I am going to spend the money. When the money is spent you will know who the man is and you will honour him because of his public spirit. In that particular department I think we are fairly ahead, but I found in other departments we were vastly behind.

One of the unique elements in England, especially in England and Wales, was the gardening. About ten years ago the British Government passed a law authorizing School Boards to rent fields for schools in several of the cities, and especially in Norwich, where I saw magnificent gardens. Flower gardens in connection with the schools? Yes, and vegetable gardens as well, where the boys were trained to grow things. There is some peculiar power that comes into the life of a soul when it is trained to grow things. There are fewer criminals in jail of those in this occupation, proportionately, than in any other class of men, even of ministers. The entering into partnership with the power behind that seed-with God, if you like to call it God-the entering into partnership with the Divine in putting that little thing into the ground and producing that plant has a magnificent influence on the life of an individual, and especially of the child who does it. The influence leads him to think, "I didn't make that grow; it never would have grown if I hadn't planted it; God and I made it grow, and God and I may be partners and ought to be partners." Of course there are practical advantages that come from that, too. They rent a large field and the boys and girls have a place assigned to them and they produce beautiful flowers and beautiful vegetables at a time when we would insist on them grinding away at Grammar or History or Literature, or worse than any, Arithmetic, or something of that kind, and those boys and girls who spend that half-day a week in gardening outside make more rapid progress in Grammar, History and Geography than they did before, when they were not allowed to do this gardening. I wish we had a lot of the vacant lots in Toronto where the boys and girls could spend a portion of what we call school-hours, for it would be more productive in the development of their character than many of the other things we do in school.

They are doing vastly more manual training than they were four or five or ten years ago in England or than we do now. There are people yet in Toronto who think it is a fad, but we are going some day to develop it much more than it is in our schools today so as to lead up, as a rational basis, for the hard work which is to be done in our technical schools and our trade schools; so that every boy shall have as good an education as the lawyer or the doctor or the minister for his work, whatever that may be. There are many other things that come to a boy of practical worth when he takes up manual training. There is nothing else that develops his own intellectual power more. I might say these manual training classes are excellent for the very, very few boys, I am glad to say, in our city who are defective mentally. I had the pleasure of going with the Chief Inspector and Mrs. Buggin to see those schools in London for the training of mentally-defective children, and I am glad to find we do not have enough of these here to establish one school. That is very satisfactory. They have a great many there for reasons which I don't need to go into now, but with the few of those defective boys we have in our City I am trying to keep them till they are eight or nine in the kindergarten. There are two classes of children that ought to remain till about nine, those who are defective and those who are too keenly bright mentally. Those who are extremely bright should be kept in the kindergarten and not commence the storing of their minds until their minds have been developed properly and until their nervous systems have been toned up or down, as the case may be, and brought more in harmony with the physical. When their physical health has been brought up to the mental health then they may leave the kindergarten. I keep those very defective boys in the kindergarten until they are nine and then send them to our manual classes, and the best doctors in the City heartily approve of it as a process of trying to make and strengthen what little they have rather than storing the brain with, for them, useless knowledge.

In Bristol at the girls' school, here corresponding to any one of our advanced girls' schools, they have a cottage rented near the school, in which every girl spends two weeks of her last year, and she stays there also at nights-not two weeks consecutively, but she has to take two weeks in that cottage, doing the work of that cottage and attending to every room, which should be, in an ideal cottage, not too expensively fitted up. They are trained to perform the various duties from the kitchen to the dining rooms, bedrooms and parlour and all the process. They are trained to do all the cleaning and ventilating, washing and everything in the best possible scientific way. In Bradford I found they had fitted up schools. They had -a washing room nearly twice as large as we are in. On the ground floor of the last school I visited there they had all the rooms of a house fitted up with furniture, moderately fitted up, in which the girls spent one hundred hours of their last year in learning all the processes of cleaning clothes of all kinds, and mending clothes of all kinds, and generally dealing with the work that an intelligent house-wife should do in her home. I think our girls would be better trained for their life's work, the great body of them, if they had that work to do in connection with our schools, and I am going to try and get it done. My time is up and I have only touched those departments where I thought I found the Old Country schools most in advance of ours.