u/ddgr815

>Administrators say after years of struggle, the district is finally moving the needle, and the data bears that out. The Education Scorecard, a new analysis from researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth that draws on state and national test scores, shows Detroit students are making faster improvement in reading and math compared with similar districts.

>Detroit’s installed both multilingual interventionists and reading interventionists like Penick across its schools — including 267 to work with K-2 students specifically. Their work ramps up during 120-minute literacy blocks instituted in Detroit schools every day.

>A first grade classroom’s bulletin board lists the names of students behind and ahead in certain reading skills. In kindergarten, assessment data is posted.

>Detroit gives families a lot of choices: They can attend schools with more rigorous programs, language immersion schools, and African-centered education. Vitti wants to celebrate choice.

>“But with choice comes responsibility,” he said.

>And if families choose something other than their neighborhood school, that means they need to still get students to their desks on-time, every day. If not, Vitti said the district is starting to have conversations with parents about returning to neighborhood schools, particularly if a student has missed 45 or more days of school. That signals a student doesn’t have reliable transportation to get to school.

>Recess represents a temporary suspension of cognitive effort, which helps to maintain efficiency and concentration while managing stress, a benefit for adolescents and children. The importance of regular restorative breaks during an adult’s workday is unquestioned. For students and teachers, however, such breaks need to be codified within a highly structured curriculum. Time allotted for recess depends on several factors: state laws, district policies, and importantly, principal and teacher discretion. Recess positively impacts teaching and learning, benefitting student achievement. However, not all students experience daily recess. Schools with lower socioeconomic status and/or with a higher proportion of marginalized or minoritized students tend to offer less recess and are more likely to withhold it for academic or punitive reasons. Generally, there are 2 competing perspectives. In the first, the school’s mission is to prepare the student for work in a complex, shifting, technological society and break times compete with academic time. In the second, a school’s responsibility is to help develop the whole child, preparing them for the intellectual rigors of adulthood and for the social, emotional, and complex societal challenges of 21st century life. Recess promotes this goal. Yet, irrespective of written state or district policy, recess often occurs at the discretion of an individual teacher, who may withhold it as a disciplinary tool or to extend academic teaching time.

>Research supports “Recess Before Lunch” to prevent a rushed lunch period and positively affect recess participation. Teachers and researchers have noted improved behavior and attention once students resume classroom work when recess occurs before lunch.

>In other countries, such as Australia, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Turkey, Uganda, and the United Kingdom, students have multiple breaks (morning, afternoon, lunch), following every 45 to 50 minutes of instruction.

>Sandseter described 6 different types of risky play, 3 of which are relevant to schools: play involving balance (climbing, swinging); speed (running); and/or “rough-and-tumble play” (keep away, sports).81 Risky play demands heightened attention, self-regulation, creative problem-solving, and a recognition of personal boundaries, all of which are fundamental to a child’s evolving independence. Providing opportunities for children to confront or create uncertainty, unpredictability, and even potential hazard as part of their play experiences should be viewed as an inherent purpose of play. When recess monitors are well-trained, they can help establish shared expectations for tolerating some risk as a basis for healthy development.

Did the shift from home and one-room schools to Prussian-style schools help or hinder intellectual progress?

If they did help, is there a historical reason for the modern pushback against the Prussian model?

>>“Our purpose wants to occupy all the mind’s attention for itself, obstructing the full view of most of the things around us (…) The child, because it has no conscious object of life beyond living, can see all things around it, can hear every sound with a perfect freedom of attention, not having to exercise choice in the collection of information.

>According to the “method of nature,” guessing and trying out are preferable to explaining; unconscious learning and sudden surprises are preferable to focused effort; and experiencing and discovering the world first hand is preferable to books. Tagore argues that learning by the “method of nature” will allow children to develop their creativity and to apply what they have learnt. Tagore uses an analogy to warn educators of the detrimental effects of applying the adult method of learning to children:

>>“It is like forcing upon the flower the mission of the fruit. The flower has to wait for its chances. It has to keep its heart open to the sunlight and to the breeze, to wait its opportunity for some insect to come seeking honey. The flower lives in a world of surprises, but the fruit must close its heart in order to ripen its seed. It must take a different course altogether. For the flower the chance coming of an insect is a great event, but for the fruit its intrusion means an injury.”

>Tagore thinks that children’s freedom (which does not mean licence) should allow them to determine what they want to do for a large part of their time. He criticizes most adults for structuring children’s time and activities so much that they have no space to develop their lives and selves individually, to find their own voices, and to express themselves creatively.

>Tagore is convinced that an ideal school should be amidst nature. In Santiniketan, lessons take place mostly outside in the shade of trees. For schools in less warm climates, he recommends spending at least one school day completely outside, not counting sports, games, and excursions.

>parents should be careful not to confer their own desires for the material and purposeful to their children and their much simpler needs; either through mollycoddling or through modelling and pushing them towards their own worldly aspirations of turning them into mere “moneymakers.” He emphasizes how important it is for children to experience nature through their bodies – without having windows, chairs, or shoes in the way –, and to develop creativity and responsibility when they are lacking ready-made products and instruments. He argues: “The real king is he who is able to create his own kingdom.”

>He believed that only when students take part in creating their school, it can be their nest, instead of remain a mere cage.

>>[A] teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame.”

>>“Do not be preoccupied with method. Leave your instincts to guide you to life. Children differ from one another. One must learn to know them, to navigate among them as one navigates among reefs. To explore the geography of their minds, a mysteriousinstinct, sympathetic to life, is the best of all guides.”

>>“The watery stuff into which literary nectar is now diluted for being served up to the young takes full account of their childishness, but none of them as growing human beings. Children’s books should be such as can partly be understood by them and partly not. In our childhood we read every available book from one end to the other; and both what we understood, and what we did not, went on working within us. That is how the world itself reacts on the child consciousness. The child makes its own what it understands, while that which is beyond leads it on a step forward.”

>To implement true internationalism, Tagore believed that children should be deeply rooted in their own culture but at the same time realize their unity with all of humanity. Like spirituality, Tagore did not think that international understanding and tolerance could be taught but that they have to be learnt through positive experiences with others.

>Metacognition is a person’s ability to reflect on their own thinking. These skills can be broken down into two areas: cognitive knowledge and cognitive regulation. Cognitive knowledge includes what we understand about ourselves as learners, such as how we learn, solve problems, and make decisions. Cognitive regulation includes how people monitor and adjust their thinking, such as assessing a task, making plans, and recognizing when things aren’t working and shifting strategies.

>For many years, learning scientists believed this type of reflective thinking developed in later childhood, but research has shown that children as young as 3 can demonstrate and develop metacognitive skills. This knowledge has important implications: Students who develop strong metacognitive skills have been shown to have improved academic outcomes in the future.

>Children are strongly invested in their play, so guided reflection on play provides a means for utilizing a high-interest activity to develop metacognitive skills. This is in line with the Universal Design for Learning principle of engagement, which recognizes that learning deepens when students are emotionally invested and find personal relevance in a task. For most children, play is the highest-engagement activity of their day. Beyond that, free play provides an opportunity for children to naturally encounter problems to solve, conflicts to navigate, decisions to make, and strategies to try, revise, and try again. The experience of play is critical, and reflection on play transforms the experience into further learning.

>For play reflection, documentation is a key first step. With our youngest students, this may include teachers capturing pictures, videos, and observational notes during play to reference during post-play reflection activities. Older students can participate in documenting their play by taking their own photos or videos. Post-play, teachers can guide students to reflect using a variety of methods, including partner or group discussion, drawing, journaling, or reflection using multimedia tools.

>During play reflection, the role of the teacher includes asking open-ended questions that help make thinking visible, validating the process of play over the product, and modeling reflective language. The goal in facilitating play reflection is not to evaluate play but rather to draw the child’s attention to their own thinking, decision-making, and emotions during play.

>Reflection prompts children to recognize their own strengths, preferences, and challenges, which builds self-awareness of their own learning. When a child says, “I’m really good at building, but I didn’t get enough long sticks before I started,” they are developing a clearer picture of themselves as a thinker and a learner. Learners who understand their own preferences, strengths, and even weaknesses are better positioned to access and sustain learning.

>When children reflect on how they navigate challenges during play, they begin to identify and name the strategies that they used. This reflection helps kids to understand that there are tools available when things feel hard. A child who reflects, “The sticks kept falling down, so I tried using bigger rocks to hold them up,” is recognizing that when one strategy fails, another can be implemented. Reflection also supports a child’s ability to build tolerance to challenges, which supports self-regulation. A child who can say, “I got really frustrated when it kept falling, so I took a break before trying again,” is learning how to name their emotional experience as well as identifying strategies that support self-regulation.

>Learning from failure can spark creativity and strengthen problem-solving skills. This type of reflection supports productive failure and resilience, helping children learn to use setbacks as opportunities to adjust their approaches, persist, and try again.

>Most powerfully, when students can examine and reflect on their thinking about play, it improves their ability to apply that thinking in other contexts, including academic work. The language of reflection can be transferred from play to more specific academic tasks and life experiences.

I. It's natural that animals get eaten

This argument says that some animals are food as part of the natural order of the universe, or as part of God's plan, and it is wrong to interfere with this by abolishing eating meat.

There would have to be some certain way of distinguishing natural food animals from those who should not be eaten - without such a method injustice is sure to occur. No such test is possible.

II. Animals are inferior beings

This argument says that even if eating animals is cruel and degrading, animals are not human and so their suffering is not ethically important or unimportant and they do not have any rights that would justify the abolition of eating meat.

Some people take the argument further and say that animals are beings who are so inferior that they deserve to be eaten.

III. Being farmed is good for animals

This argument teaches that animals lack the ability to run their own lives and are therefore better-off and happier in a system where their lives are run by others.

IV. Eating meat would be too difficult to abolish

This probably is the reason why some cultures choose to tolerate eating animals while trying to eradicate many of the more cruel practices - but it is not a justification for eating meat.

V. Animal products are essential to certain industries

A number of industries depend on animal products, and employers claim that abolishing farming animals would be economically disastrous.

VI. Eating animals is acceptable in this culture

Eating animals is generally accepted by the majority in some societies - if ethics is a matter of public opinion, then some would say that eating animals is ethically OK in those societies where it is the cultural norm.

VII. Abolishing eating animals would threaten the structure of society

This argument is popular - but it is perhaps an argument that a particular society is ethically flawed and needs reorganisation.

VIII. Living in captivity is better than starving to death

In circumstances of extreme environmental degredation, living in captivity may be the least bad available option.

While being farmed may be the least bad option for an individual animal, this doesn't justify farming animals, but indicates that action should be taken to provide other better options to animals.

IX. Animals should be able to become captive if they want to

It can be argued that this sort of captivity isn't real captivity until some form of coercion is involved.

Since it would only apply to a tiny proportion of cases of 'farming' it is not a justification for farming animals itself.

[Adapted from this guide.]

>Many of the studies on music and sleep are done with preterm infants in the NICU – including one which compared infants who heard Mozart to infants who heard their mother's lullabies plus a control group that didn't hear any music.

>"What they found was that the mothers' lullabies were more soothing to the infants," she says. "They slept better, but they also showed a lot of the effects of decreased heart rate and respiration, better feeding, which probably explains why they had fewer days in the neonatal intensive care unit and their mothers' anxiety was reduced."

>Still, there is just something about lullabies, says Sam Mehr, who studies the psychology of music at the University of Auckland. He also directs The Music Lab. His team did a study playing songs for infants in an unfamiliar language – some of the songs were lullabies, and some weren't.

>The babies found all the songs pretty relaxing, he says, "but when they're listening to these lullabies, even though they're totally unfamiliar and not in a language the baby understands, they relax more. So there's something in the kind of DNA of lullaby that helps to calm infants."

>"You can imagine that a parent who learns that this is the case and actually increases the amount of time that they spend [singing], you could imagine all these follow-on effects, where the baby's easier to soothe, so the parent's more chilled out and not as stressed about being a parent, which is already a pretty stressful thing," he says.

>There is some evidence that singing to infants can help boost a parent's confidence (that superhero feeling I get). One study of nearly 400 mothers in England found that singing to babies daily was associated with less postpartum depression and higher wellbeing and self-esteem. And in another study, mothers that sang to their children for 90 minutes in a group felt more closeness to their infants than mothers that talked and played but did not sing.

>Transitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively recent entrant into the U.S. early education landscape, combining features of public pre-K and regular kindergarten. We provide the first estimates of the impact of Michigan’s TK program on 3rd grade test scores. Using an augmented regression discontinuity design, we find that TK improves 3rd grade math scores by 0.29 standard deviations relative to a counterfactual that includes other formal and informal learning options. This impact is notably large relative to the prior pre-K literature. Estimates for English Language Arts (ELA) are imprecise but suggestive of a positive effect as well.

>Pay for Success is a public-private partnership that changes the way that the government does business by holding programs accountable to achieving pre-specified outcomes. In this specific Pay for Success project, the upfront cost to scale the Nurse-Family Partnership’s services to nearly 4,000 pregnant women across South Carolina was covered by philanthropic investments and a Medicaid 1915(b) waiver that allows NFP to draw down federal and state Medicaid funding. If the contract-specified targets are met, South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services will make success payments — all of which would be reinvested in the Nurse-Family Partnership’s programming in South Carolina — based on the achievement of four outcomes selected with the Nurse-Family Partnership.

Michigan Roadmap

>In New York City, most of the low-income families who use a child care voucher enroll their children in home-based programs. But those small programs are uniquely vulnerable to economic shocks because they enroll fewer children than center-based programs and have less access to grants and resources than other child care settings.

>Some organizations are trying to help with various initiatives designed for home-based providers. Espinal is one of 50 Bronx-based child care providers who benefited from a guaranteed income pilot program called the Thriving Providers Project, a national program run in six states by the nonprofit Home Grown, which supports home-based child care.

>“Family child care is still waiting for compensation that is matching the true cost of care,” said Lara Kyriakou, senior director of policy at All Our Kin, a nonprofit that supports family child care providers and that partnered with Home Grown to run the Bronx pilot program.

>Research that Stanford University’s Center on Early Childhood conducted on Thriving Providers shows that the predictable funds allow early educators to pay off debts and buy food; in some cases, it’s the difference between keeping their businesses open or closed. Child care income can fluctuate based on enrollment, attendance and state voucher policies, which makes reliable income more critical, experts say. With predictable funds, “you are able to just continue functioning without any concerns about funding,” said Kyriakou. That supports providers but also enables a “continuity of care and a stable, nurturing environment” for children.

>Research shows even modest cash bonuses and stipend programs for providers in states like California and Virginia improved chronically low early educator retention rates. In the District of Columbia, which offered a wage supplement of $10,000 to $14,000 per year to home and center-based providers beginning in 2022, research found child care employment increased by 7 percent within two years.

>Education is not necessarily a qualification for making one's life successful, nor for safeguarding one's own interests. It is really a qualification for a fuller life, a life of thought for oneself and of consideration for others. Education is that which gradually expands in its length and breadth, horizontally and perpendicularly. We may further explain this as being the knowledge of oneself and one's surroundings; the knowledge of others, both those who are known to us and those who are unknown and away; the knowledge of the conditions of human nature and of life's demands; and the knowledge of cause and effect, which leads in the end to the knowledge of the world within and without.

>No doubt it is difficult to think of vast knowledge of life in connection with a child, but we must remember that as a rule the grown-ups underestimate the capacity of a child's mind, which is very often more eager to understand and more capable of comprehension than that of a grown-up person. Although you cannot start with a deep subject at the beginning of a child's education, you can always keep before you the large design you have in view and wish to reach.

>The great fault of modern education has been that, with all its advanced methods of training children, it has missed what is most important; namely the lesson of unselfishness. Man thinks that an unselfish person is incapable of guarding his own interests in life; but however much it may appear so it is not so in reality. A selfish person is a disappointment to others, and in the end a disadvantage to himself. Mankind is interdependent, and the happiness of each depends upon the happiness of all, and it is this lesson that humanity has to learn today as the first and the last lesson.

>The infant begins its first activity in life by making a noise, trying to speak or moving its hands and legs to show a certain rhythm. If the same faculty which every infant shows naturally is taken as the basis of his education, one can educate even an infant. The education given at the earliest age is invaluable to the child, for as the child grows, it acquires certain habits by itself; and once it has become fixed in its way of looking at things and thinking and behaving, these habits are hard to change. It is like letting the rainwater make its own way instead of digging a canal to take the water to the farm or garden. In this way a child's tendency to learn and to act can be used to the best advantage, if the parents only know how. The Indians say that the mother is the first Guru; this should be realized by all parents. Education begins at home, and it is this first education which is the foundation of all that a child may learn in the future.

>The first education a child needs is to harmonize its thought, speech and action. All things external have their reaction in one's inner life, and the inner has its reaction on the exterior. Therefore some knowledge of tone and rhythm is essential in the beginning of a child's education. A child should be taught the elements of music with regard to the pitch in which it should get in touch with its friends, with strangers, with its parents, while playing or at the table; in every varying condition it should feel that the pitch is different. The child should be taught how to make its choice of words when speaking to different people, to strangers, to its friends, to its parents, to the servants of the house; making the voice softer or louder must be done with understanding.

>The child is most energetic when it is growing, and every action, sitting, standing, walking, or running, every movement it makes should be corrected and directed towards harmony and beauty. For the nature of life is intoxicating, and every action deepens the intoxication of life in a child, who is still ignorant of the outcome of every action; it knows little of the consequences and is only interested in the action. By nature a child is more enthusiastic and excitable than a grown-up person, and if its actions are not corrected or controlled it will mostly speak and act without consideration of harmony and beauty; for the nature of the child is like water which runs downwards and it needs a fountain to raise it upwards. Education is that fountain.

>It is a great pity that at this present time, when the cry for freedom seems to be so dominant, people often think, 'Why should not the children have their freedom?' But it must be understood that it is not the path of freedom which leads to the goal of freedom. Liberty is not an ideal to begin life with, it is a stage of perfect freedom which must be kept in view in order to arrive at the desired end.

>Consideration is a faculty which it is most necessary to develop in the child from the beginning; for once it has become inconsiderate, it is difficult to give it the sense of consideration. Consideration cannot be taught; it must come by itself; but the duty of the parents is to help it to rise in the child. They can very well accomplish this in a pleasant manner, without becoming a bore to the innocent mind of the child, by showing it where consideration is needed in different situations of life.

>It is easy to accuse a child of inconsiderateness, but that does not always profit it. On the contrary, the child will often become annoyed at such accusations and hardened in its faults, defending its actions against the accusations of others, which is a natural human tendency. The way of the wise is to show appreciation whenever that child shows consideration, and to make it conscious of that virtue, so that it may be able to enjoy its beauty. This develops in the child a taste for virtue; it feels happy to act rightly, instead of always being forced to do so. It is on strength of mind that the entire life of the child depends, and strength of mind can be developed in the child by making it self-confident all it thinks, says, or does; it must get to know something instead of being forced to believe it.

>But it is altogether a wrong principle, for children as well as for grown-ups, to divide work and play thus. Play should be useful and should be work at the same time; and work should be made like play, in order that it may not be a tedious task but a pleasure in life. If this idea were worked out well it would solve a great many labor problems which disturb the peace and order of humanity so much today.

>It can be best done by teaching children to play and work at the same time, so that when they are grown-up work and play will continue to be the same. All that one does with pleasure is done well and produces a good effect. Doing depends on the attitude of the mind. When the mind is not in a good state, whatever be the work, however interesting, it will not be well done. To bring about peace and order in the world it is necessary that all work should be made pleasant, and that all pleasure should be turned into work, so that in taking pleasure no work is lost and there is pleasure in working. The central theme in the education of children should be the occupying of every moment of their life in doing quite willfully something which is pleasurable and at the same time useful. Life is a great opportunity, and no moment of life should be lost.

>The great fault of the modern system of education is that it only qualifies a man to obtain what he desires in life; and he tries to obtain this my every means, right or wrong, often with no regard for what losses or pain he causes others. The consequence of this is that life has become full of competition in trade, in the professions, and in the State. In order that one may gain another must surely lose. In this way the shadow changes its position from morning to evening; in the end the shadow must prove to be only a shadow, and one realizes it matters little which direction the shadow takes.

>The study should be divided, partly indoors and partly outdoors. The teaching given to a child indoors should be different than the study given out of doors. The outdoor study should concern all that the child sees; one can then include the practice or the experience of what it has learned indoors.

>The freedom of the child must always be considered; it should never be forced but only guided gently. One should produce in a child the desire to choose as its friends those whom it feels to be congenial. As soon as the liberty of a child is interfered with, the child begins to feel captive and the lantern of its conscience becomes dim. Therefore the duty of the parents is to guide the child constantly, yet freeing it gradually to make a choice in everything in life. Parents who do not understand this and do not attach sufficient importance to it, very often cause the child to go astray while trying to guide it.

>A child should learn to recognize its relation and duty to all those around it. Once should let it know what is expected of it by its father, mother, brothers, sisters; for the recognition of relationship is the sign of human character which is not seen among animals. A son who has not been a good son to his mother will not be a good husband to his wife, for he has missed his first chance of developing thoughtfulness and the love quality. But as the child grows it must be led to have some idea of the further relationship between human beings. For the world is a family, and the right attitude of a young soul must be to see in every man his brother and in every woman his sister; he must look on aged people as he would on his father or mother.

>The betterment of the world mostly depends upon the development of the coming generation. The ideal of human brotherhood should be taught at home; this does not mean that the child must recognize human brotherhood before recognizing the relationship at with his own brothers and sisters; but the relationship at home must be the first lesson in human brotherhood which the child may reach by realizing the brotherhood of the nation, of the race, of the world. It is a fault when a person does not progress in the path of brotherhood. The child should be taught to picture first its own town as a family, then its nation as a family, and then the entire continent as a family, in order to arrive at the idea that the whole world is a family.

>To the classical writer, it would have been meaningless to hold up, as an end in itself, what the romantics later called "originality." For one can be "original" in any number of ways. For example, to react counter to the truth in every respect is, after all, a form of "originality." On the other hand, if "original" is equated with "unusual" or "rare," nothing is more "original" than really to react in accordance with the truth. The term, in fact, is meaningless as an ideal for which to strive. The end is awareness or insight; and whether the awareness is "original" is not even secondary but irrelevant.

>It is important to note why such romantic catchwords as "originality," "imagination," and "creative" are absent in classical criticism. For it is sometimes assumed that classical thought is opposed to the qualities such words suggest. It is not. It is concerned with another aim; to know, and to employ art in order to duplicate and transmit that knowledge. In the pursuit of this aim, "originality" may or may not be present. According to classical standards the "imagination" is of value to the degree that it helps give substance to the insight and make it concrete. As for being " creative " — the Greek word for poet, after all, is " maker ," and to fashion an imitation is to make or create — everything depends on the value and truth of what is being created; on whether the artist, in Aristotle's words, is "creative according to a true idea."

>the foundation of the classical tradition is its confidence in a rationally ordered and harmonious universe, working according to fixed laws, principles, and forms. The universe is not a meaningless hurly-burly of atoms; least of all is it something the qualities and characteristics of which are made up in our own minds. Rather, the universe is regarded as a meaningful process, in which all the parts are interrelated with the living whole; and because of their confidence in such an ordered universe and their eager desire to pierce through to increasingly more basic and general principles, the Greeks succeeded in creating philosophy as we know it — systematic philosophical thinking, in place of the isolated maxims and observations of earlier civilizations. According to this philosophy universal forms and principles constitute the essential character of nature. Plato held the extreme conviction that these forms are the sole genuine reality; while Aristotle after him maintained the modified view that the universal forms must work through the material and the concrete in order to fulfill themselves, i.e., they must have something to form in order to become forming agents, although the concrete itself is nothing except as it is being formed. But in the views of both Plato and Aristotle, as well as in Greek thought generally, the focal point of interest is the permanent rules that govern and pervade all events.

>Aristotle says that poetry is "more philosophical" than history. For history relates circumstances as they occurred in time, one after another. Only as it tries to be philosophical does history concentrate on the causal interconnection of things, leaving out details that are irrelevant to the general pattern or meaning. Now poetry, like philosophy, looks at once for the general form: it is selective, and omits all particular events or characteristics that do not emphasize or lead directly to the general order it is trying to disclose. Accordingly, poetry is concerned with the "ideal," or "what ought to be." The "ideal," in most classical writing, refers to the way things would be if the form, the principle, that is operating through them were carried out to its completion or logical fulfillment.

>In the middle and late eighteenth century, the meaning of the word "imitation" became narrower, and it was then set up in opposition to words like "creativity" and "originality." Because this more restricted definition implied literal copying, it seemed strange, for example, to call music an "imitative" art — to call any art "imitative," for that matter, except painting and sculpture. But the original Greek use of the term was more liberal and far-reaching, and was quite applicable to music. Thus, in Aristotle's suggestive discussion of music in his Politics (and it is characteristically Greek that, in an analysis of statecraft, the educational value of music should have a prominent place), music is viewed as an even more valuable and essential form of "imitation" than painting. For music can "imitate" the "moral habits" and "states of feeling" that take place in the human mind or soul. The soul is an "activity"; so is music. Feeling, moral persuasions, habits of reacting, all take place in time; they have duration. Music, unlike painting, also has duration. Sounds following one another, the use of melody and rhythm, make up a pattern or form that exists through the passage of time. Music can thus "imitate" directly the ebb and flow of feeling, states of mind, "moral habits," and different varieties of "character"; it can especially imitate more highly ordered feelings, attitudes, or traits of character than we ordinarily have, and then infiltrate them directly into our feelings, at once deepening the intensity of our feeling and molding and channeling it by a harmonious and ordered form.

>the general classical concern with form in the arts: with completeness of outline and with subduing the part to the whole — or rather with treating the part only as it contributes to or emerges into a rounded finality of structure. General examples would be the classical emphasis on plot rather than character in the drama, on the total figure rather than individual features in sculpture, and on line rather than colour in painting. In every case, form is stressed, not because it gives us a change from our daily lives, not because it shows inventive or technical cleverness on the part of the artist, but because it is believed to be the transmuting or duplicating of what is real (i.e., what pervades and controls nature itself), and because we are the better for knowing what is true with as vivid and full a realization as we can. Accordingly, the classical qualities of decorum and balance — of rhythm, symmetry, and integration of parts — are not pursued as ends in themselves (classicism is not deliberate and self-conscious formalism). They evolve as by-products of the attempt to imitate or duplicate an ordered nature or reality — of the attempt to offer a heightened and harmonious presentation of truth.

>When Tolstoy opened his school in the autumn of 1859 in a single room of his large manor house at Yasnaya Polyana, free education for peasant children did not exist in Russia. Occasionally, a village would boast of a priest or an ex-soldier who taught a few children at so much per head. The subjects were elementary, the method a mixture of blows and learning by heart, and the results negligible. This situation Tolstoy wished to remedy by substituting public education based on entirely original pedagogical methods.

>With half a year of highly successful teaching behind him, it was almost inevitable that Tolstoy should find himself bedevilled in a maze of speculation on pedagogy and obsessed with schemes for improving national education. In March, 1860, he wrote to a friend, E. P. Kovalevsky, brother of the Minister of National Education, of his efforts and mentioned that he already had fifty students and that the number was growing.

>>"Wisdom in all worldly affairs it seems to me," he continued, "consists not in recognizing what must be done but in knowing what to do first and then what comes after."

>after reading Montaigne, he wrote:

>>"In education, once more, the chief things are equality and freedom."

>Julius Froebel, nephew of Friedrich Froebel the celebrated educational reformer and founder of the kindergarten system, has left an interesting account of his discussion with Tolstoy:

>>" 'Progress in Russia,' he told me, 'must come out of public education, which among us will give better results than in Germany, because the Russian masses are not yet spoiled by false education."'

>Tolstoy went on to inform him of his own school in which learning was in no sense obligatory.

>>"'If education is good,' he said, 'then the need for it will manifest itself like hunger."'

>From his visits to the schools of Marseille, Tolstoy took away a gloomy impression of the futility of the subjects taught and the lifeless, unimaginative methods of teaching them. On the other hand, when he talked with workers and children on the streets, he found them intelligent, free-thinking, and surprisingly well informed, but with no thanks to their schooling.

>This situation led him to conclude in a later account of these experiences, in an article entitled "On National Education":

>>"Here is an unconscious school undermining a compulsory school and making its contents almost of no worth.... What I saw in Marseille and in all other countries amounts to this: everywhere the principal part in educating a people is played not by schools, but by life."

>This is the kind of characteristic half-truth that Tolstoy was fond of deducing from incomplete experience, and it became an important factor in his educational theorizing. But even half-truths that blasted away the hard shell of traditional and erroneous thinking on vital social problems had their value for him.

>Over the door of the school Tolstoy placed the inscription: "Enter and Leave Freely." Perhaps he was thinking, by way of contrast, of Dante's inscription over hell: "Abandon Hope, All Ye who Enter Here," which he would hardly have hesitated to place above the entrance to most European schools he had visited. Certainly the atmosphere of his own school convinced the children that education was a precious and joyous heritage.

>Tolstoy believed that all education should be free and voluntary. He supported the desire of the masses for education, but he denied that the government or any other authority had the right to force it upon them. The logic of things, and his study of the operation of compulsory education abroad, convinced him that in this form it was an evil. Pupils should come to learn of their own accord, for if education were a good, it would be found as necessary as the air they breathed. If people were antagonistic, then the will of the people should become the guiding factor. Tolstoy's faith in the "will of the people," even though the people might oppose commonly accepted notions of progress, contained the seeds of his later anarchism, and was a direct slap at radical reformers who would uplift the masses against their will.

>Tolstoy also believed that education should answer the needs of the masses, but his conception of their needs had nothing in common with that of contemporary progressive thinkers. Nor did he have any patience with the widespread pedagogical conviction that education should mould the character and improve the morals of students. These were matters for family influence, he declared, and the teacher had no right to introduce his personal moral standards or social convictions into the sanctity of the home. In public education he was concerned primarily with peasants, the vast majority of the population. But he was not bent on elevating them above their class by the power of education (a definite evil in his eyes); he was concerned with making them better, more successful, and happier peasants.

>In this context the individualistic direction of Tolstoy's thought was apparent. The assumption of civilization's progress in Macaulay, Buckle, and especially in Hegel, he firmly rejected. For some time opposition between the good of the individual and the good of society had been troubling him. He was already developing a philosophy hostile to the pragmatic ideal that progress could be achieved only by social education of the people through the medium of democracy. Progress was personal, he felt, and not social. Education must serve the individual and not society, for the individual's capacity to serve humanity was what gave meaning to life. Yet he did not appear to see the contradiction in his rejection of the whole modern concept of progress. He would teach the peasant child what he needed, but what he needed was often conditioned by the social system in which he lived.

>In his article "On National Education" Tolstoy defined education as "a human activity based on desire for equality and a constant tendency or urge to advance in knowledge." Education, he asserted, was history and therefore had no final aim. Its only method was experience; its only criterion, freedom.

>During the morning, elementary and advanced reading were taught, composition, penmanship, grammar, sacred history, Russian history, drawing, music, mathematics, natural sciences, and religion; in the afternoon there were experiments in physical sciences and lessons in singing, reading, and composition. No consistent order was followed, however, and lessons were lengthened or omitted according to the degree of interest manifested by the students. On Sundays the teachers met to talk over the work and lay out plans for the following week. But there was no obligation to adhere to any plan, and each teacher was placed entirely upon his own. For a time they kept a common diary in which were set down with merciless frankness their failures as well as their successes.

>Originality was the guiding spirit. Freedom ruled, but never to the extent of anarchy. When Tolstoy purposely left the room in the middle of a lesson to test the behaviour of his students, they did not break into an uproar as he had observed was the case in similar circumstances in classrooms he visited abroad. When he left, the students were enjoying complete freedom, and hence they behaved as though he were still in the room. They corrected or praised each other's work, and some-times they grew entirely quiet. Such results, he explained, were natural in a school where the pupils were not obliged to attend, to remain, or to pay attention.

>Tolstoy insisted that only in the absence of force and compulsion could natural relations be maintained between teacher and pupils. The teacher defined the limits of freedom in the classroom by his knowledge and capacity to manage. And the pupils, Tolstoy wrote, should be treated as reasoning and reasonable beings; only then would they find out that order was essential and that self-government was necessary to preserve it. If pupils were really interested in what was being taught, he declared, disorder would rarely occur, and when it did, the interested students would compel the disorderly ones to pay attention.

>The successful functioning of such a school demanded unusual ability on the part of the teacher. Tolstoy admitted this, and justly claimed for himself a certain pedagogic tact. Always in his mind was the pupil's convenience in learning and not the teacher's in teaching. He argued that there was no best method in teaching a subject; the best method was that which the teacher happened to know best. That method was good which when introduced did not necessitate an increase of discipline, and that which required greater severity was bad. The method should develop out of the exigencies of a given problem in teaching, and it should please the pupils instead of the teacher. In short, teaching, according to Tolstoy, could not be described as a method; it was a talent, an art. Finality and perfection were never achieved in it; development and perfecting continued endlessly.

>In this free atmosphere of student-dominated learning, certain traditional subjects were resisted in a manner that led Tolstoy to doubt their ultimate usefulness and to question the desirability of teaching them to youngsters. Grammar was such a subject. Although his emphasis in instruction favoured analysis, the kind involved in grammar put the students to sleep. To write correctly and to correct mistakes made by others gave his pupils pleasure, but this was only true when the process was unrelated to grammar. After much experimentation with teaching the subject, he concluded in an article in Yasnaya Polyana that

>>"grammar comes of itself as a mental and not unprofitable gymnastic exercise, and language — to write with skill and to read and understand — also comes of itself."

>In the pages of his educational magazine, Tolstoy provides vivid accounts, filled with all the charm of his realistic art, of daily life at the school. On a cold winter morning the bell would ring. Children would run out into the village street. There was no lagging on the way, no urge to play the truant. Each child was eager to get there first. The pupils carried nothing in their hands, no homework books or exercises. They had not been obliged to remember any lesson. They brought only themselves, their receptive natures, and the certainty that it would be as jolly in school that day as it had been the day before.

>At the end of a lesson Tolstoy would announce that it was time to eat and play, and, challenging them to race him out-doors, he would leap downstairs, three or four steps at a time, followed by a pack of screaming laughing children. Then he would face them in the snow and they would clamber over his back, desperately striving to pull him down. He was more like an older brother to them and they responded to his efforts with devotion and tireless interest. Their close, even tender, relations are touchingly reflected in one of the magazine articles. He describes how, after school, he accompanies several of the pupils home on a moonless winter night by a roundabout way through the woods, entertaining them with tales of Caucasian robbers and brave Cossacks. The youngest, a ten-year-old boy, furtively clasps two of his teacher's fingers during the most fearful part of a story. At the end of the narration, by one of those quick transitions of children, an older pupil suddenly asks why do they have to learn singing at school? "What is drawing for?" Tolstoy rhetorically asks, puzzled for the moment about how to explain the usefulness of art. "Yes, why draw figures?" - another queries. "What is a lime tree for?" a third asks. At once all begin to speculate on these questions, and the fact emerges that not everything exists for use, that there is also beauty, and that art is beauty

>>"It feels strange to repeat what we said then," Tolstoy writes, "but it seems to me that we said all that can be said about utility, and plastic and moral beauty."

>Tolstoy ended this account in his article by meditating on the age-old question of the moral and practical utility of educating the masses. The cultured, he wrote, would remonstrate: Why give these poor peasant children the knowledge that will make them dissatisfied with their class and their lot in life? But such a peasant boy, concluded Tolstoy, addressing the upper class,

>>"needs what your life of ten generations unoppressed by labor has brought to you. You had the leisure to search, to think, to suffer — then give him that for which you suffered; this is what he needs. You, like the Egyptian priest, conceal yourself from him by a mysterious cloak, you bury in the earth the talent given to you by history. Do not fear: nothing human is harmful to man. Do you doubt yourself? Surrender to the feeling and it will not deceive you. Trust in his [the peasant boy's] nature, and you will be convinced that he will take only that which history commanded you to give him, that which you have earned by suffering."

>He declared that nearly all contemporary art was intended for people of leisure and artificial training and was therefore useless to the masses, whose demand for art was more legitimate. He dismissed with some vexation the stale notion that in order to understand and appreciate the beautiful a certain amount of preparation was necessary.

>>"Who said this?" he asked in his magazine account of the writing of the story. "Why? What proves it? It is only a dodge, a loophole to escape from the hopeless position to which the false direction of our art, produced for one class alone, has led us. Why are the beauty of the sun, of the human face, the beauty of the sounds of a folk song, and of deeds of love and self-sacrifice accessible to everyone, and why do they demand no preparation? "

>The ABC Book, based upon pedagogical theories that Tolstoy had developed and put into practice in his village school was designed, as he said, for the teacher who loved both his calling and his pupils. The work firmly eschews useless or erudite knowledge, or facts beyond the comprehension or experience of beginners. For the chief significance of teaching, he maintained, was not in the assimilation of a known quantity of information, but in awakening in students an interest in knowledge.

>With ruthless dogmatism he condemns outright the phonetic and visual methods of teaching then used in Russian elementary schools. And those native teachers who burned incense to German pedagogical theory he sharply criticized for failing to understand or respect the educational needs of the Russian masses. All a teacher has to know, he declares, is what to teach and how to teach. To find out what to teach, one must go to the people, to the students and their parents. At present, he asserts, the people demand that their children learn how to read and write and to cipher. Until they demand something more, teachers have no right to teach more. As for how to teach, he sums it up in his old phrase: the only criterion for pedagogy is freedom, the only method is experience.

>Despite hostility to Tolstoy's educational practices and writings during his lifetime, since then there has been a tendency to acclaim him a brilliant innovator and one of the most significant of educational reformers. Experimental schools in America and abroad have profited from the full accounts he left of his own experiences. His methods of teaching the alphabet and reading, his insistence on self-reliance by obliging students to do manual labor, and his belief that the child should be allowed as much freedom as possible in the classroom — these features of his system have had their influence in later progressive education. And one of his principal theses, that the school should always remain a kind of pedagogical laboratory to keep it from falling behind universal progress, has found wide acceptance as an educational premise.