CIVIC EDUCATION THROUGH PARTICIPATION.

One final characteristic of present-day civic education which must be referred to in this partial review is the tendency toward participation in civic activities as a means of civic training. Not only is action the end of all good citizenship, but it is an invaluable means, as well as the end, of all good civic training. If civic education means the cultivation of qualities of good citizenship, doing something is really more important than instruction or discussion. It is through activity that habits are formed, interest kindled and maintained, initiative stimulated, and judgment developed.

It is this idea that lies back of the various schemes of pupil participation in school government. They rest on the principle that schools whose chief function is to train for efficient membership in a democracy should themselves be democratic in order that their pupils may be trained in habits of self-government. This principle is sound. But while some of these experiments have produced remarkably good results, others have failed utterly. A plan that has succeeded in one case has often been unsuccessful in another. Where the application of the idea has failed, it seems to be due to the following principal causes: (1) Overconfidence in a particular device for pupil selfgovernment as a means of civic training. It is one thing to say that pupil participation in school management is an invaluable means of civic training; it is an entirely different thing to expect that any particular piece of machinery for that purpose constitutes, in itself, adequate provision for such training. (2) A second weakness of some self-governing experiments lies in their artificiality. This has sometimes been the case with plans by which the school is organized as a city or a State, with mayors and governors and policemen and other officers that properly belong to the larger communities, but not to a school. The tendency in such cases is for the children to play at governing a city or a State instead of actually managing the realities of school life. It is to be remembered that while the school is a community, it is a school community, and not a city or a State. (3) Another cause of failure of pupil self-governing schemes has been the mistaking of one of their incidental results for their primary purpose. The real end of pupil self-government is training for citizenship; an incidental result should be a better kind of discipline in the school. But those who have thought that by introducing some scheme of self-government the school would "take care of itself," in the sense that teachers and school officers would be relieved of responsibility and labor, have been doomed to disappointment. It is true that the teacher should be relieved of much petty disciplinary effort; but a larger responsibility must take its place. (4) This suggests a fourth cause of failure on the part of many self-governing experiments, viz,

the failure of the teaching force to understand and enter into the social spirit necessary to make any such scheme a real success. self-governing school community the teacher still remains a member, and a very important member, of that community. The problem is not one of mechanics, but of social spirit, of sympathy, of interest, of thorough comprehension of the real meaning of civic life. The failure of the teaching body as a whole, through lack of training or otherwise, to enter into the spirit of cooperative self-government foredooms efforts in this direction to certain failure.

In spite of such difficulties, pupil participation in the control of the life of the school is becoming more generally recognized as an invaluable means of civic training. The tendency, however, is to place less dependence upon devices of organization, and more upon the development of a community spirit and a simple community cooperation appropriate to the ordinary conditions of school life.

It should perhaps be said, parenthetically, that the matter of dramatizing the proceedings of government, whether of city councils, or courts, or State legislatures, as a means of instruction regarding such things, is an entirely different question.

It is the idea of civic training through activity, also, that gives to the playground and the school garden their civic educational value. It is one of the elements of strength in the boy scouts and in the junior civic league. It lies at the foundation of the most advanced educational methods, and is the keynote to the new type of civic instruction now finding its way into the elementary school. New schemes for the participation of children in actual civic enterprises outside of the school are appearing almost daily. With all its value, however, there is also a danger in this participation by children in civic affairs. It requires the best of judgment on the part of those who direct it. A recent article in an educational journal described a method of civic training that led a little elementary schoolgirl to rebuke men on the street for expectorating. Good judgment, at least, was lacking in this case. There have been cases where boys have bred flies in putrid meat for the sake of winning a prize in a fly-swatting campaign. The motive was wrong in such cases. It must be borne in mind that the purpose of the school is to educate, and not to exploit the children to bring about reforms that the established agencies and the more responsible citizens have failed to accomplish.

Civic education has seemed to many to be either a very indefinite thing with little that is tangible about it, or else a very particular thing of narrow application and of little general interest. Vocational education makes a strong appeal to the business man because he can see it in terms of efficiency among his employees, or in terms of ability on the part of the boy to find and hold a job. It suggests something

very definite and desirable, even though the average citizen probably knows little or nothing about the complicated educational problems involved in it. It has not been so with civic education. "Training for citizenship" indeed strikes a spark of interest; but so long as it meant merely formal instruction in government it savored too much of the schoolroom to arouse general interest; and since the revolt. against this narrow conception began, no clearly defined concept has been formulated to take its place. The first necessity, then, is to interpret training for citizenship, or civic education, in the light of actual tendencies and demands. This task is far from complete, but the foregoing partial review may help to define the significance and scope of the problem.

CIVIC EDUCATION OF THE IMMIGRANT.

One of the conspicuous features of civic education to-day, as shown above, is that it comprises a number of related, but nevertheless distinct, problems. The more we narrow our view upon one or other of these component problems, the more definite they become. As we refer to some of these, one thing will stand out conspicuously, and that is the extent to which each depends for its solution upon the solution of others.

For example, the effective civic education of the immigrant depends, among other things, upon the availability of suitable texts or other printed matter, and upon properly trained teachers. It depends upon the working out of methods by which to reach the motives, the interests, the sense of personal responsibility, the initiative, as well as the intelligence, of the immigrant. It also depends in a measure upon whether the immigrant is a city dweller or has made his home in a rural district. Every successful piece of work that is done in the field of elementary or high-school civics, or in civic education for continuation schools, or in rural or urban civics, or in the normal schools, will have its suggestion for the successful civic education of the immigrant. A successful method of approaching the problem of the civic education of the immigrant, therefore, involves the perspective which is furnished by keeping in mind the other special problems included in the comprehensive scheme. It is in large measure because this has not always been done that some of the special and unrelated schemes for immigrant education have proved so inadequate.

We have been speaking here of the adult immigrant. As for the immigrant child, provision for his civic training forms a part of the problem of civic education in elementary, secondary, and continuation schools. It may be added that one of the most effective channels by which to reach the adult immigrant is through his children, which

only adds further emphasis to the need of a type of civic education in the schools that will enter into the very lives of the pupils.

Nevertheless, the civic education of the adult immigrant has its own peculiar aspects. It requires, first of all, a knowledge of the immigrant, and indeed of each group of immigrants. When the first "foreigners" came to America, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they interpreted what they found here in terms of their own experience. They referred to the adobe communal dwellings of Mexico as palaces, and described the barbarous society of that new land in terms of emperors, lords, and knights. The disastrous results of the contact of these early Europeans with the natives were in large measure due to a total misunderstanding between two radically different civilizations. The same thing is largely true to-day. What would happen, for example, if the native of eastern Europe, who in his native land is accustomed to look upon the justice of the peace in his little village as his paternal adviser on all sorts of questions of daily life, should attempt to follow the same custom with the officers with the same title in this country? The civic education of the immigrant must be a process by which he is definitely helped to make the transition from his European type of community life to the American type. He is not a child; he is an adult with a definite mental and social heritage. Success in helping him depends as much upon understanding what he brings with him as it does upon a formal knowledge of our own institutions.

ELEMENTARY COMMUNITY CIVICS.

Reference has been made to the extension of civic education into the elementary schools. As the result of several years' attention to this problem there have been evolved some very definite concepts as to the type of civic education that is best adapted to the needs and capacities and interests of children of grammar-school age. The most usual form of the new elementary civic education has come to be known quite widely as "community civics." The aim of "community civics" is to help the pupil "to know his own community"-not merely a collection of formal facts about it, but especially the meaning of his community life, what it does for him and how it does it (especially through the channels of government), what the community has a right to expect from him, and how he may fulfill his obligation; meanwhile, by various methods, cultivating in the pupil the essential qualities and habits of good citizenship.

"Community civics" inevitably lays much emphasis upon the local community and the local civic relations, because (1) it is the local community with which every citizen, especially the young citizen, comes into most intimate relations and which is almost

always in the foreground of consciousness; and (2) it is easier for the child (as for any citizen) to realize his membership in his local community, to feel a sense of personal responsibility for it, and to enter into active cooperation with it, than is the case with the vast national community. It is in connection with the local community life that the young citizen most readily forms habits of good citizenship.

In many localities the more or less systematic study of the immediate community is now a part of the regular curriculum. Chicago affords a notable example of this. Indianapolis was one of the first cities to introduce systematic community civics in the grammar schools; in fact, it was the work done here that seems to have suggested the term "community civics." Cincinnati introduced a similar course, largely through the influence of her neighbor, Indianapolis. Newark, N. J., has for a number of years had a course in "Newark study" in its schools.

A noteworthy feature of the Newark plan is the cooperation of the public library in making available to the pupils and other citizens of that city well-selected and abundant printed material relating to every phase of Newark's development and community life. Similar work has been done in other cities through the cooperation of other agencies with the public schools. In Indianapolis, for example, the commercial club cooperated with the board of education in the publication of pamphlets relating to the history and government of that city. Several years earlier the Chicago Normal College issued some such material, including the story of "The Fight for Life in Chicago," which was an account of the development of Chicago's means of health protection. At the present time the Chicago Normal College is publishing in the Educational Bi-Monthly a series of articles on "The History and Government of Chicago." In a few instances local textbooks are being prepared for the use of the local schools.

The emphasis given to the local community for the reasons given above seems to tend in some cases to obscure the real significance of the term "community civics." The significance of this term does not lie in its geographical implications, but in its implication of community interests, community relations, community cooperation through government. The term should by no means exclude the national or the State concept. The Nation and the State are as truly communities as is the town or city, and their governments are as really means by which the citizens may cooperate as in the case of local governments. A study of one's local community may be as lifeless and as devoid of the real spirit of community civics as the old formal study of the machinery of the Federal Government. On the other hand, the spirit of community civics may be made thoroughly to infuse the study of the Nation or the State.