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PREPARATION OF THE TEACHER.

In the field of elementary civic education we are brought sharply up against the problem of the preparation of the teacher for this vital type of work. One of the urgent needs is for a teaching force better trained on the civic side. This suggests the necessity for a vitalized type of civic education in institutions that train teachers, including the high school, the normal training school, and the college. The high-school problem will be referred to later. In the training schools for teachers there is the greatest need for something more vital than the formal courses and examinations in government that have prevailed heretofore. A valuable suggestion may be found in the work of the State Normal School at Athens, Ga. This is described in full in Bulletin, 1913, No. 23, Bureau of Education. The following quotations suggest the spirit and method of the work there:

The final justification of public taxation for public education lies in the training of the young people for citizenship. If a public institution is not doing this, it has no reason for existence, at least no claim upon the public purse.

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The Georgia Club believes that an institution supported by the State ought thoroughly to know the Commonwealth that gives it life; that it ought to adjust its work to the needs of the State, acquaint its students with the resources and possibilities of the State, and breed in them the wisdom, the willingness, and the skill that the Commonwealth has a right to expect from her sons and daughters.

The Georgia Club may be said to have stumbled into the discovery that the home State and the home county are proper subjects of school study; that exact information about one's own community and people arouses sympathetic concern and civic conscience, and therefore furnishes a definite and sure foundation for social service and efficient citizenship.

And so the Georgia Club speedily settled down into a faithful study of the near, the here, and the now, the significance of the community occupations and businesses, the forces and agencies that are offering obstacles or creating opportunities in the field of social service to which as teachers we are consecrating ourselves.

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What is needed seems to be not formal insulated textbook courses in economics and sociology; but direct, first-hand, sympathetic experience with the workaday world of men; the dyeing of our hands, the steeping of our minds in the affairs of community life-business, civic, social, and religous.

The club members here will be teachers, but few of them will be teachers merely; they will be leaders as well in every kind of progressive community enterprise. The mere teacher ought to go out of existence. The State does not need teachers merely, but teachers who are citizens and patriots as well. The club develops leadership as well as teachership.

A number of school superintendents have expressed their conviction that the schools of large communities, at least, should have supervisors or directors of civic education, one of whose first duties would be to serve as the connecting link between the teaching body and the realities of the community life and who would lead conferences among the teachers relative to the facts regarding the community and the methods by which the civic consciousness and civic habits of the pupils may be cultivated.

There is a widespread demand at present on the part of school authorities and teachers for literature that will suggest concretely methods by which civic education may be vitalized, largely derived from the experience of successful teachers. The Bureau of Education is attempting to meet this demand as far as possible.

CIVIC EDUCATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS.

The problem of civic education in the high school is of peculiar importance. The high school is in part, though only in part, a preparatory school for the college. The work that it does can not be college work, though in its organization the needs of the pupil who goes to college must be kept in mind. The college problem, as well as the high-school problem, is greatly complicated by the absence of the proper kind of articulation between the two grades of institution. As has been suggested above, the civics work of the high school has been too largely an imitation of the college course, and too little a preparation for it. Though the college men have themselves been largely responsible for the character of the courses in history and government given in the high schools, they are now coming to recognize that what the college entrant needs is not so much a mass of facts about government as a correct point of view, a right attitude, an interest, and a motive.

On the other hand, the majority of high-school pupils do not go to college. Their work is not in preparation for a college course, but for active participation in life. On the civic side of this preparation it is also coming to be recognized that the formal study of government and of history heretofore prevailing is inadequate. Here again, while a certain appreciation of civic facts within the mental capacity of pupils of high-school age is necessary, underlying this is the necessity for a point of view, an attitude, an interest, and a motive. Further, the point of view, the attitude, the interest, and the motives that really prepare the student for college entrance are also those that give the best preparation for civic life.

It is on this side of methods of cultivating right attitude, interest, motive, and right habits of civic thought and action, that the high school is learning from and building upon the "new civics" as applied to the elementary school. On the side of content, the high school is drawing upon the college and university subjects to a greater extent than formerly. Good citizenship depends not only upon knowledge of government, but also upon a broadly sociological viewpoint, and a knowledge of the social and economic relations that underlie government. Therefore sociology and political economy, as well as political science and history, are now drafted into the service of the high school in training for citizenship.

At this point appear certain possible dangers. First, there is the danger of doing with these other subjects what was formerly done in the case of government, viz, carrying over into the high-school courses that are adapted only to the college or university. Second, there is the ever-present danger of overloading the high-school curriculum. The historical enthusiast has been diligent in seeking to extend the time allotment of history; the political scientist urges more attention to government as such; political economy as a separate subject has its advocates, as has also sociology. The advocates of the last-named science are divided into at least two camps, those who favor the more or less abstract and theoretical treatment of the subject, and those who would make of it a course in "social service" or philanthropy. The real problem whose solution is urgent at the present time is how to make all these fields of knowledge contribute effectively to the civic education of the high-school pupil without overloading the course of study and without transforming the high school into a college.

One of the committees of the commission on the reorganization of secondary education appointed by the National Education Association in 1913 is the committee on social studies, which include history, civics, and economics. This committee has been, and still is, diligently working at this problem of civic education in its broad sense. One report of this committee was issued by the Bureau of Education as Bulletin, 1913, No. 41. A second report has been submitted in manuscript, and a final report will be issued in the near future.

CIVIC EDUCATION IN COLLEGES.

With reference to the trend of civic education in the colleges and universities, perhaps the most significant feature is the increasing attention given to training for public service as a profession. In addition to a multiplicity of general and special courses in political science, political economy, and sociology, departments are being added in an increasing number of institutions for the practical study of legislative and administrative methods with a view to training experts or leaders in civic life. This and other influences are tending to make of public service a career to be prepared for as are the careers of law, or medicine, or business. To prepare for such professional service in civic life is one of the proper functions of the university.

Only a small percentage of the students of the colleges and universities will engage in public service as a profession, however. The great majority are to be business or professional men, absorbed for the most part in the affairs of private life. Nevertheless, it is these college graduates to whom democracy should be able to look for leadership in thought and action in the ranks, and, as occasion. arises, in public position.

To give the coming professional or business men or farmers some preparation for this lay leadership, the colleges and universities are offering increasing opportunities in the form of a wide variety of courses in sociology, economics, or political science, in the hope that a certain portion of the students will somewhere in the course find opportunity to elect some subject of a social or civic character. Nevertheless, one of the questions discussed most earnestly by national conferences of college teachers of these subjects is, How can we arouse greater interest in these subjects and in civic matters generally, on the part of larger numbers of students ?

One device resorted to in the hope of increasing the general interest of students in civic matters, and incidentally in the civic or social subjects, is the organization of civic or good-government clubs. Such clubs exist in a considerable number of colleges, and in some cases at least afford valuable support to the regular work of the curriculum. Yet in six institutions visited this year in which such clubs existed the clubs included a total membership of less than 100 out of an aggregate student enrollment of about 12,000.

In the University of North Carolina, however, there is a North Carolina Club (similar to the Georgia Club at the State Normal School at Athens, Ga.) which is itself a federation of "Home-county clubs," the latter being clubs of students from the several counties of the State. Each of these clubs is making an intimate, concrete study of the conditions and problems of its home county-social, economic, political. Through the federation, the results of the work of the several county clubs are brought together into an organized mass of first-hand knowledge about the State of North Carolina. From these clubs there will go back into every section of the State farmers, business and professional men, school-teachers, and housekeepers, with a knowledge of local and State conditions, and, what is more important, an interest in their own civic life. One of the secrets of the success of the North Carolina and Georgia plans is that the students are not studying, primarily, abstract economic and political and social questions, but are learning "to know their own community" in its relation to their own interests. On the basis of such work the broader and more abstract principles of political and economic life acquire new interest, and the departments of the university devoted to these subjects are expanding as might be expected.

A further partial answer, however, to the question how to interest larger numbers of college students in the social and civic subjects will doubtless be found in the reorganized civic work of the elementary and, especially, of the secondary schools, by which a point of view, an attitude, an interest, and a motive, will be cultivated, that will lead the college entrant to want to know more of the subjects which the higher institutions are offering with increasingly liberal hand.

CIVIC ASPECTS OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION.

By cultivating efficiency in the economic life of the community, Vocational education contributes to the civic training of the pupil. Nevertheless, vocational education may be essentially selfish or uncivic in its character. That is, its motive may be to enable the individual worker, or the individual employer, to satisfy his own economic interests without due regard to the interests of others, or of the community as a whole. A program of civic education must include provision for vocational training; but, on the other hand, sound vocational education not only affords unusual opportunity for civic training of the most practical and far-reaching character, but demands that such civic training be given.

The broader civic aspects and opportunities of vocational education have so far received comparatively little attention, but they are now forcing their way into the foreground. The new law establishing continuation schools in Wisconsin, for example, requires that in them "citizenship" shall be taught. The questions as to what should constitute a course in citizenship in a vocational school, how it should differ from a course in citizenship in the ordinary high school, if at all, and how it may be related most directly and most effectively to the main purpose of such schools, are demanding answers. A similar situation exists in Boston and elsewhere. The Bureau of Education includes attention to this phase of civic education in its plans for the coming year.

CIVIC EDUCATION IN RURAL COMMUNITIES.

One of the greatest educational problems of the present is that of reorganizing and redirecting rural education. This is a part of the still broader problem of the readjustment of rural life to meet the changing conditions of the times. The rural educational problem involves that of providing adequate instruction and training to enable the child, or the adult, for that matter, to understand his rural community and his relations to it, and to take his place effectively in his community life. The solution of this problem involves many thingsfirst of all, of course, an understanding of the significance and nature of the changes that are so profoundly affecting rural life. It involves, again, the question of suitable texts and other printed material which, of course, must be quite different from those required for the civic education of the foreigner. Few textbooks exist that are really suitable for vital work in civics, and probably there is none that is adapted to the peculiar needs of the rural community. Federal and State Governments, through their departments of agriculture and other channels, issue much good material; but comparatively little of it is really in available form. We also come back to the problem of the

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