Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship

Extract

I start with the obvious starting point: the gap between teaching and scholarship. For the most part, the conceptions of the arts and sciences which are presented to children in school are not those that contemporary scholars regard as being in fact the elementary principles of those subjects as now conceived. I think it was the mathematicians who first realized that the elementary mathematics taught in schools reflected conceptions of the subject that were centuries out of date. They have begun to do something about this, and to try to develop a curriculum for mathematics which will present, in a logical sequence, a contemporary view of what mathematics is. Other subjects, including English, remain uncoordinated, based on what are at best ad hoc principles. At one end there are the techniques for teaching children to read, which are said to be very efficient when they work, and at the other there are the survey courses of the first year in university, designed to give a student some notion of the chronological order in which the great classics got written. I think it should be possible to work out a curriculum for the intervening stages which will treat literature as a progressive and systematic study, and which will furnish the student with something of tangible and permanent value at whatever stage he drops out of it. It seems to me that, as with mathematics, the first procedure is to make sure that the literary sequence makes sense in itself, regardless of its relations with other subjects, even in elementary school. The relation with other subjects is certainly important and essential, but must come later in consideration.