SUNY at Oswego - Ontarian Yearbook (Oswego, NY)

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Past-Present-Future. Ufime goeth not baclqward, nor tarries with yesterday. Seventy-five years have witnessed many changes throughout our land. We have changed from an agricultural to an industrial society. Migrations from the farms have concentrated the greater part of our population in cities. lnventions and their application to our occupations have changed our mode of living, have enhanced our comforts, enlarged our fields of activity, facilitated our inter- course with others. Occupations are more specialized and many of the old-time occupations have disappeared. Mass production and modern transportation facilities overwhelm us with plethora of goods of which the man of the ox-cart stage did not even ltnow the names. These material changes have wrought far-reaching influences upon our social ideals, standards of living, moral codes, amusements and the use of the greater leisure which the present day affords. The farmer of the past might be content to wring a living from the soil. l-le had little leisure to satisfy any aspirations for the aesthetic phases of living which we thinlc of as cultural. Literature, music, graphic and plastic arts were too remote to be attainable. It required modern inventions to malce the products of culture accessible to all. Educational aims and practices also have undergone extensive modifications. Schools have had to assume functions once performed by the home. Urban- ization of population has compelled group instruction and made possible more homogeneous group- ing of children. The enrichment of school curricula has demanded more and more intensive preparation for the practice of teaching. When Edward Austen Sheldon entered upon his career, education was essentially a function of the agricultural home. Children were sent to school to be trained in the arts of reading, writing and computation which they could not learn at home. ln addition to these arts, the schools attempted to familiarize children with information relating to history, geography, and literature. The system- atized content of these subjects had no immediate bearing upon the active life of children and had to be acquired from boolcs, by the process of memorizing. The gulf between natural learning in the home and boolc learning was broad, since the content of boolc learning was remote from the real life of the children and the learning process was artificial and unlilce the method of learning in real life. Many thoughtful teachers were aware of the existence of this gulf. Some, more enterprising than others, made attempts to bridge the gulf. Sheldon, among others, was alert to the need of a teaching technique more in accord with natural learning and with the needs of children. l'lis Search made him acquainted with l7'estalozzi's objective method of teaching the school arts, and he made this Pesta- lozzian method the basis of a reform of instruction which he introduced into the Oswego city schools of which he was at the time superintendent. This innovation attracted many progressive teachers, and Oswego became the Mecca for many earnest teachers in their quest for improved teaching methods. As the numbers of these pilgrims increased it became inevitable that Sheldon's attention be focused upon the problem of teacher training in addition to improvement of teaching children. The resources of a city training class soon became inadequate to meet the influx of teachers in search of improved methods of teaching. ln 1867 the state of New York subsidized the city training class and established it as one of a system of normal schools designed for the improvement of teaching. The Qswego State Normal and Training School from henceforth was explicitly dedicated to two aims, better teaching and training better teachers. Pestalozzian objective teaching was only the initial step in the advancement of teaching children.

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mr-mem ITTITHITIHIT f f vu AQ 5, rx - ff, o3,, R.' , SALAQQ A 1 -.ALA :asf , A, 1, fifv '+P-Q - -5:5 , published by THE ELASS UE T935 To commemoration of THE Toth ANNIVERSARY UE STATE NUTTMAL SEHUUL USWEEU- N -Y

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It was one of the major factors in stimulating interest in the teaching process. During the first quarter century hundreds of Oswego graduates carried the gospel of better teaching into communities throughout the country and made it conscious of the need for better trained teachers and instruc- tional facilities. Other educational reforms were furthered in connection with the Pestalozzian movement in Oswego. Froebel's Kindergarten and its philosophy of education through activity found a genial atmosphere in Oswego. Manual training in its functional aspect was added to the teaching program while the movement itself was still in its swaddling clothes. Nature study, the daughter of object teaching and science became one of the cores for the correlation of the increasing subjects of the curriculum, literature being the other. Early in the life of the school, laboratory practice replaced demonstration, not only in the fields of science but particularly in the practice of the teaching art. The practice school developed into the most important factor in teacher training. The l-lerbartian movement, with its emphasis upon character training, the doctrine of interest, the formal steps of instruction, the organization of subject-matter into Umethod wholesn Cunit activitiesb received a hearty welcome and became still another factor in the Oswego movement toward better teaching. During the first half century of its existence the Oswego schools, as well as the country at large, addressed themselves to the improvement of methods of teaching. ln later years the various pedagogical movements, especially the l-lerbartian influence, have tended to direct attention from the logical, subject matter, point of view to the psychological, child development, conception. As we approach the present, we find that child nature and child development occupy the center of pedagogical stage and that methods and techniques of teaching are relegated to a more sub- ordinate position. The child, his health, his capacities, his antecedents, his present and future needs, his happiness, these are the determiners of the lcind of school necessary for his education in this greatly changed social order and also of the character of the instruction which will meet his present day needs. Ouite recently the child, who is the cause of all our pedagogical agitation, has had to yield a part of the spotlight to the teacher. When we contrast the changed mode of living, cultural advant- ages and occupational pursuits of today with the agrarian order of bygone days, we are persuaded that we need teachers to match the times, no less than the children to whom they are to minister unto. Greater maturity, with a better understanding of our more complex society, of increased culture which mal4es possible participation in an American culture which is rapidly assuming form and becoming vocal. This is in part the motive for converting the teacher training institutions of the past into some equivalent of the colleges. No longer is the ability to teach the three R's adequate teacher equipment .... ln addition he must be an interpreter of our complex social order, must be able to introduce pupils into various cultural fields and feel happy therein, must himself be the embodiment of a cultivated person whose influence, because of what he is, will be more potent even than what he teaches. And so we see the emergence of the teacher of the future from the level of craftsmanship to the higher professional sphere, endowed with enhanced self-respect, pronounced professional con- sciousness and esprit-de-corps. A living institution has body and soul. Though its body changes, its soul lives in the successive generations of its graduates who interpret the practice of service to childhood and humanity in terms of Alma lVlater's ideals. Dr. Richard K. Piez