This is what happens when a child at first begins to build with blocks, and it is equally what happens when a scientific man in his laboratory begins to experiment with unfamiliar objects.
I enjoy this ideology because it is a very wholesome one. A very human one as well. It seems to me as a very posh way of saying "let kids be kids". Then educate them like Montessori later in life.
Even the kindergarten and Montessori techniques are so anxious to get at intellectual distinctions, without “waste of time,” that they tend to ignore—or reduce—the immediate crude handling of the familiar material of experience, and to introduce pupils at once to material which expresses the intellectual distinctions which adults have made.
I really really enjoy that Montessori is disagreed with here. Obviously both have their own place and it is up to anyone's opinion to say who is right, but the highlighting of a fallacy in such a highly regarded piece of work is fun to see.
The parceling out of instruction among various ends such as acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling, writing, drawing, reciting); acquiring information (in history and geography), and training of thinking is a measure of the ineffective way in which we accomplish all three.
Maybe this is a testament to what the author is saying, but I find this opening paragraph extremely hard to follow. It may also be that I find trouble in entering the "reading time" state of mind, but it is weird to be so challenged by a simple paragraph.
Our first error was, however, a natural one. The child who has mastered the spelling-book gives the impression of knowing how to read. Indeed, he does read the signs over the shop doors, the names of newspapers, and every word that comes under his eyes. It would be very natural if, entering a library, this child should be deluded into thinking that he knew how to read the sense of all the books he saw there. But attempting to do this, he would soon feel that “to know how to read mechanically” is nothing, and that he needs to go back to school. So it is with the teachers whom we have[Pg 11] thought to prepare for scientific pedagogy by teaching them anthropometry and psychometry.
This is extremely evident in society today and could easily be observed with the students of today. It is not, however, seen in every student. While it is important to figure out how to fix this problem, it must also be vital to understand why those select individuals have transcended this modern "norm"
nor have the scientifically trained teachers ever measured up to the standards of genuine scientists.
I feel this is extremely subjective. I am not educated on this subject but I feel this opinion only deters teachers from ever "measuring up to the standards of genuine scientists".
“To measure the head, the height, etc., does not indeed mean that we are establishing a system of pedagogy, but it indicates the road which we may follow to arrive at such a system, since if we are to educate an individual, we must have a definite and direct knowledge of him.”
This is obviously done incorrectly in schools nowadays, referring to the large class sizes and common core putting restrictions on mostly everything. This raises the question, though, does homeschooling produce a better pedagogy? Or is it dependent on the specific educator?
But in spite of all these tendencies, Scientific Pedagogy has never yet been definitely constructed nor defined. It is something vague of which we speak, but which does not,[Pg 2] in reality, exist. We might say that it has been, up to the present time, the mere intuition or suggestion of a science which, by the aid of the positive and experimental sciences that have renewed the thought of the nineteenth century, must emerge from the mist and clouds that have surrounded it.
It is interesting to think about the hugely varying ideas that restrict the existence of a Scientific Pedagogy. Not even those that oppose each other through a research standpoint, but also those that are constrained by religious beliefs.