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The School and Society / Being three lectures

Chapter 4: AUTHOR’S NOTE
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About This Book

The book presents three lectures and a supplemental account describing how schooling must align with social change and children's lives. It argues that education should transmit collective achievements to all citizens, reshape curricula around activity, manual training, and inquiry, and integrate subjects through projects rooted in pupils' experiences. It critiques fragmented, rote instruction as wasteful and calls for reorganization of school structures, schedules, and aims to promote economy, efficiency, and fuller growth. The supplemental statement recounts the formation and practices of an experimental elementary school that models these principles through organized activities, teacher collaboration, and curricular innovations.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A second edition affords a grateful opportunity for recalling that this little book is a sign of the coöperating thoughts and sympathies of many persons. Its indebtedness to Mrs. Emmons Blaine is partly indicated in the dedication. From my friends, Mr. and Mrs. George Herbert Mead, came that interest, unflagging attention to detail, and artistic taste which, in my absence, remade colloquial remarks until they were fit to print, and then saw the results through the press with the present attractive result—a mode of authorship made easy, which I recommend to others fortunate enough to possess such friends.

It would be an extended paragraph which should list all the friends whose timely and persisting generosity has made possible the school which inspired and defined the ideas of these pages. These friends, I am sure, would be the first to recognize the peculiar appropriateness of especial mention of the names of Mrs. Charles R. Crane and Mrs. William R. Linn.

And the school itself in its educational work is a joint undertaking. Many have engaged in shaping it. The clear and experienced intelligence of my wife is wrought everywhere into its texture. The wisdom, tact and devotion of its instructors have brought about a transformation of its original amorphous plans into articulate form and substance with life and movement of their own. Whatever the issue of the ideas presented in this book, the satisfaction coming from the coöperation of the diverse thoughts and deeds of many persons in undertaking to enlarge the life of the child will abide.

January 5, 1900