Individual Educational Work in Collective Education

Individual Educational Work in Collective Education The authors report on their attem pt to analyse, on the basis of empiric material, individual educational processes in a collective educational institution. The educators at a Pupil's Home in Bratislava (for boys from 14 to 18 years of ag ) recorded each individual educational measure they had taken (date, name of pupil, situation, what sort of measure, and pupil's response). In the course o f one year (from February 1960 to January 1961) they collected 1,142 recordings. By a quantitative and qualitative analysis of this material the authors arrived at the followng results, concerning the motives of individual educational media, their content and relation to individual edicational situations:
1. Educational situations which called for an individual educational measure were the following: non-sbservance of the daily tim e-table at the Pupils’ Home (30.7 per cestn, marks and learning (16 per cent), pupils’ personal affairs (13 per cent), conduct (10.8 per cent), keeping their things and the Institution tidy (9.3 per cent), behaviour towards fellow pupils (4.7 per cent), and personal belongings (1.1 j per cent).
2. The individual educational measures carried out took, as to their content, mostly the form of admotion, childing, and reprimand (36 per cent), then the form of advice, explanation, warning and discussion (30.5 per cent), and very often also the character of prohibition to do something that is not allowed or order to do something that is required (12.9 per cent). The content of individual educationnal media just is characteristic of the educator at Pupils’ Homes, as it account for as much as four fifths all the measures taken by him. Media with the following content are on the increase: appointing the pupil for duty or assigning him some work, with drawing from him the usual advantages (such as walks, leaves of absence), disciplinary measures taken by other educational institutions, payments of damages, rendering help (e. g. learning), transfer, permission of exception from the daily time-table, commeding the pupil. But these are very rare : only two of them reach 5 per cent, while all the others together account for only 10 per cent.
3. When appraising individual media carried out according to whether they represented a positive or a negative intervention in the life of the pupil, 40.3 per cent of them proved to be positive and 49.7 per cent negative.
4. When tracing the relationship between the occurrence of positive and negative education media on the one hand and Inividual educational situations, on the other hand, there proved to be striking regularities: certain educational situations evokepositive media (learning, personal belongings, personal affairs) while others evoke negative media (conduct, relations to fellow pupils, keeping order and the daily timetable), the prevalence of the positive or the negative in each instance being clearly marked (tw ofold or even fourfold). Only in the case of one category, viz. in organizing collective life, educational media of either quality are approximately balanced.
5. It has also been found that the choice of the educational media in use is not casual, but Is determined by the specificity of the educational situation: only certain kinds of educational media are characteristic of certain educational situations.
The authors consider the method they have used to be a suitable one for an empiric inquiry Into educational processes at collective educational institutions. If this method were used on a large scale, it would be possible to obtain momentous knowledge about the essence of these processes and at the same time to work out a scientific basis for a planned control of these processes.