THE CHILD-CENTERED APPROACH TO EDUCATION IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Proponents of the child-centred approach to education have typically argued that the school should be fitted to the needs of the child and not the child to the school. These ideas, first explored in Europe, notably in Rousseau's Émile (1762) and in Pestalozzi's How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801), were implemented in American systems by pioneering educators such as Francis W. Parker. Parker became superintendent of schools in Quincy, Mass., in 1875. He assailed the mechanical, assembly-line methods of traditional schools and stressed “quality teaching,” by which he meant such things as activity, creative self-expression, excursions, understanding the individual, and the development of personality.

A different approach to child-centred education arose as a result of the study and care of the physically and mentally handicapped. Teachers had to invent their own methods to meet the needs of such children, because the ordinary schools did not supply them. When these methods proved successful with handicapped children, the question arose whether they might not yield even better results with ordinary children. During the first decade of the 20th century, the educationists Maria Montessori of Rome and Ovid Decroly of Brussels both successfully applied their educational inventions in schools for ordinary boys and girls.

The Montessori method's underlying assumption is the child's need to escape from the domination of parent and teacher. According to Montessori, children, who are the unhappy victims of adult suppression, have been compelled to adopt defensive measures foreign to their real nature in the struggle to hold their own. The first move toward the reform of education, therefore, should be directed toward educators: to enlighten their consciences, to remove their perceptions of superiority, and to make them humble and passive in their attitudes toward the young. The next move should be to provide a new environment in which the child has a chance to live a life of his own. In the Montessori method, the senses are separately trained by means of apparatuses calculated to enlist spontaneous interest at the successive stages of mental growth. By similar self-educative devices, the child is led to individual mastery of the basic skills of everyday life and then to schoolwork in arithmetic and grammar.

The Decroly method can be characterized as a program of work based on centres of interest and educative games. Its basic feature is the workshop-classroom, in which children can go freely about their own occupations. Behind the complex of individual activities there is a carefully organized scheme of work based on an analysis of the fundamental needs of the child. The principle of giving priority to wholes rather than to parts is emphasized in teaching children to read, write, and count, and care is taken to reach a comprehensive view of the experiences of life.

The Montessori and the Decroly methods have spread throughout the world and have widely influenced attitudes and practices of educating young children.

Pestalozzian principles have also encouraged the introduction of music education into early childhood programs. Research has shown that music has an undeniable effect on the development of the young child, especially in such areas as movement, temper, and speech and listening patterns. The four most common methods of early childhood music education are those developed by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Carl Orff, and Zoltán Kodály and the Comprehensive Musicianship approach. The Dalcroze method emphasizes movement; Orff, dramatization; Kodály, singing games; and Comprehensive Musicianship, exploration and discovery. Another popular method, developed by the Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki, is based on the theory that young children learn music in the same way that they learn their first language.

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