Excerpt from The Curriculum of the Model and Training School, Vol. 7: August, 1919

Since the making of an elementary school curriculum is merely an effort to print a fairly adequate statement as to the materials and methods used in directing children through a period of living and learning, with added exhibits of results and of the mechanics of some of the processes used in getting these results, it is important that an effort should be made beforehand to indicate the ideas back of this curriculum making.

The principal idea back of this particular curriculum is that of synthesis, -not of a series of compromises but of a genuine synthesis of necessity and of aspiration. The ideal home achieves a synthesis of the lives of the children in the home, interested chiefly in their play, and the lives of the grown-up members of the family, interested chiefly in their several vocations. This ideal home is the best place possible for both the grown-ups and the children. Each group is better because the presence of the other compels ever recurring daily solution of the problems of home life, and compels a conscious effort to think the whole problem out.

The ideal school would be the one that achieved the successful synthesis of the child's desire to do things and to know things and of his inevitably childish way of doing and knowing, with the adult's desire to have the child do and know certain things useful and agreeable to the adult and to society. It is entirely possible to make an approach to this ideal school, since the child knows, probably all too well, that the Situation gives the adult-the right to demand certain things of the child, and since the adult, at any rate the adult of some enlightenment, is beginning to admit the rights and the needs of the child.

All of this means that nearly all of our controversies as to what are the right things in education are needless. The controversy now raging between the formal disciplinarians and the champions of the doctrine of interest, with either Side trying to illustrate and justify its conclusions in the real or alleged lessons of the great war, is a case in point. Both are wrong and both are right; but the one who becomes an absolutist in his doctrine, is entirely wrong. However, the disciplinarian not too far gone in his conviction can be made to see that the best discipline implies an intense interest - as at West Point, where the cadet's willing ness to submit to a rigidly formal discipline in drill and in studies because of his ardent interest in an officer's life and career constitutes an effective synthesis of the two opposed, but only secmmgly opposed, principles. Similarly, and it is an illustration of the irony of life, the tradition-shattering individualist generally ends his career by becoming the founder of a cult or school, with, of course, its sacred method or procedure or discipline. In other words, what life wants and will have is controlled or disciplined interest.

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