complicated that youth cannot adequately enter into them and learn them without
systematic teaching. At first these things were few; with the years they have
grown very numerous.
One of the earliest of these too-complicated activities was written language—
reading, writing, spelling. These matters became necessities to the adult world;
but youth under ordinary circumstances could not participate in them as
performed by adults sufficiently to master them. They had to be taught; and the
school thereby came into existence. A second thing developed about the same
time was the complicated number system used by adults. It was too difficult for
youth to master through participation only. It too had to be taught, and it offered
a second task for the schools. In the early schools this teaching of the so-called
Three R's was all that was needed, because these were the only adult activities
that had become so complicated as to require systematized teaching. Other
things were still simple enough, so that young people could enter into them
sufficiently for all necessary education.
As community vision widened and men's affairs came to extend far beyond the
horizon, a need arose for knowledge of the outlying world. This knowledge
could rarely be obtained sufficiently through travel and observation. There arose
the new need for the systematic teaching of geography. What had hitherto not
been a human necessity and therefore not an educational essential became both
because of changed social conditions.
Looking at education from this social point of view it is easy to see that there
was a time when no particular need existed for history, drawing, science,
vocational studies, civics, etc., beyond what one could acquire by mingling with
one's associates in the community. These were therefore not then essentials for
education. It is just as easy to see that changed social conditions of the present
make necessary for every one a fuller and more systematic range of ideas in each
of these fields than one can pick up incidentally. These things have thereby
become educational essentials. Whether a thing today is an educational
"essential" or not seems to depend upon two things: whether it is a human
necessity today; and whether it is so complex or inaccessible as to require
systematic teaching. The number of "essentials" changes from generation to
generation. Those today who proclaim the Three R's as the sole "essentials"
appear to be calling from out the rather distant past. Many things have since
become essential; and other things are being added year by year. The normal
method of education in things not yet put into the schools, is participation in