Ebook Public Education in the United States

The history of education as an introductory subject for students in normal schools and colleges has recently re ceived much criticism, largely because it has, as usually written and taught, had so little relation to present-day problems in education, and because it has failed to func tion, to use a common expression, in orienting the prospec tive teacher. The truth of such criticisms was brought out forcibly by a recent study which showed that, of the dozen most commonly used textbooks, only three gave as much as twenty-five per cent of their space to the developments of the past fifty years; that most of them devoted the great bulk of their space to ancient and mediaeval educa tion and European development; that most of them were cyclopaedic in character, and seemed constructed on the old fact-theory-of-knowledge basis; that only two or three attempted to relate the history they presented to present day problems in instruction; that only one made any real connection between the study of the history of education and the institutional efforts of the State in the matter of training; and that practically none treated the history of education in the light of either the recent important ad vances in educational practice and procedure or the great social, political, and industrial changes which have given the recent marked expansion of state educational effort its entire meaning.