Should the scope of the public-school system be broadened so as to take in all children capable of education? If so, how should this be done? : discussion / Walter E. Fernald.

  • Fernald, Walter E., 1859-1924.
Date:
[1903?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Should the scope of the public-school system be broadened so as to take in all children capable of education? If so, how should this be done? : discussion / Walter E. Fernald. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/52 (page 16)
    Affairs are the same in the school proper. The stupid boy is not a particle less stupid than he was fifty years ago. It takes the same natural gift on the part of the teacher to impart a spark of wisdom to a mind absolutely blank that it required fifty years ago. The same general plan of instruction is fol¬ lowed. Methods which our instructors have pursued from the first in teaching an idiot child to spell h-o-r-s-e, first introduced by Seguin, Richards, Sumner and Howe, have been imported anew, and are now used in the common schools under the name of 44 object teaching ” and 4 4 new education,*’ to teach normal children to spell the same word, who know at the start almost everything about a horse except how to spell the word. Little that is taught in our schoolroom can be learned by the children from books. We have paid much attention to physical training, a teacher highly skilled in the art having been employed to take general charge of this branch of tuition throughout the school. Our first object is to give to the inmates, so far as may be, sound bodies ; beyond that, our aims are not high. We seek to make our children competent to do as well as may be in the walk in life to which they have been born ; and this whether they are to remain with us, or are to be returned to their homes. In the words of one of these reports, written twenty-four years ago : 44 How to do the most ox>od at the least cost, how to make the appropriation of the State go further in the direction of relief and improvement, have been the chief study of the trustees.” And here let us say that the changes in the Board of Trustees have been gradual. The oldest of the present trustees was for three years the associate of Dr. Howe. The next in order of age and service came upon the Board two years after the de¬ cease of the doctor. Associated for several years with these two were members who, some of them, were fellow trustees with Dr. Howe from the beginning, and all of them for several years. Most of the present Board have been co-workers in this charity for many years. We have worked with one aim,— the good of the school, and have been practically unanimous in recommendations to the corporation and Legislature. There is another class of cases to be dealt with to-day that was not contemplated by our predecessors. The idea of delib-