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Scope and Outlook of Visual Education
Editor's Note. — This address was delivered at the Cleveland Convention of the National Education Association, February 25, 1920. It is here printed for the first time by special permission of Dr. Goode and the N. E. A.
IT is hardly necessary in the new department of Visual Education to remind ourselves of the fact that the psychologists have always been telling us that of all the senses, sight leads as an avenue of sense perception. Of that fact we are all of us sure. Nor is it news to most of us that sense perceptions are vastly reinforced and deepened when added avenues of sense are contributing to the presentation. We prove this to ourselves in a hundred ways every day. But it is one thing to state the fact and believe it and quite another thing to put it to use profitably in our formal education. Traditions in education, like other habits, persist, perpetuate themselves and may be hard to displace when better methods come along. We have grown so accustomed to the printed page as the foundation of school education — so satisfied with the old routine of assigning so much text and demanding a reaction from the pupil in some oral or written test, that it may be actually something of a shock to have a change suggested. Yet when we take an account of stock we discover that the printed page is one of the slowest means of presenting a wide range of information. To see a coral reef for even a few minutes will give a far more vivid and intimate realization of its character than any amount of printed description could do. With the impressions of the reef seen, felt, heard and smelt, a foundation is laid for a life long interest in all sorts of printed or -spoken description and discussion of coral reefs.
But the world is large, and most people are rooted to the daily task. They cannot pick up and go to the ends of the earth to see the many things it is well to know about. So to the aid of the printed page has been brought more and more, in recent years, many devices in visual education to enlist the eye in arousing interest, deepening impressions, making it easier and quicker for the student to learn and to retain the lesson.
It is my purpose in this paper to make a survey of the various ways, beyond the printed page, in which the eye may be utilized profitably in the business of education. And then to make a plea for the correlation of the different agencies and the best application of them in educational practice.
One of the oldest studies in the school — Geography — was the first to take advantage of visual methods. The map is a system of shorthand in the presentation to the eye of space relations. From the earliest time it presented areas in two dimensions and came later, by one pictorial device or another, to suggest land relief, the third dimension. The map has always been a part of the fundamental equipment in geographic instruction. And yet it has never been made to give its best service to the pupil. In all geography rooms globes and maps are essential, but the very great value of the desk outline map to be filled in by the pupil, in exercises and tests on distribution, is an open and largely unfilled field in education. For we are not only eye-minded, we are hand or motor-minded; and working on a map has possibilities in education largely overlooked.
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