DIFFERENTIATION OF COURSES
Courses of training based upon human needs should be diversified where
conditions are diversified. Uniform courses of study for all schools within a city
were justifiable in a former simpler age, when the schools were caring only for
needs that were common to all classes. But as needs have differentiated in our
large industrial cities, courses of training must also become differentiated. In
Cleveland this principle has been recognized in organizing the work of the
special schools and classes. For all the regular elementary schools, however, a
uniform course of study has been used. Under the present administration,
principals and teachers are nominally permitted wide latitude in its
administration.
A large part of this freedom is taken away by two things. One is the use by the
city of the plan of leaving textbooks to private purchase. For perfectly obvious
reasons, so long as textbooks are privately purchased, a uniform series of
textbooks must be definitely prescribed for the entire city. Uniform textbooks do
not necessarily enforce a uniform curriculum. In usual practice, however, they
do enforce it as completely as a prescribed uniform course of study manual. As
the schools of different sections of the city are allowed to experiment and to
develop variations from the course of study, they should be allowed greater
freedom in choosing the textbooks that will best serve in teaching their courses.
The second condition enforcing a uniform course of study in certain subjects is
the use of uniform examinations in those subjects. We would merely suggest
here that it is possible to use supervisory examinations without making them
uniform for all schools. Different types of school may well have different types
of examination.
Different social classes often exist within the same school. Administrative