单选题
In education, changing patterns of school attendance required new ways of thinking. As late as 1870, 【C21】______families needed children at home to do farm work, Americans attended school for an average of only four years. By 1900, however, cities contained multitudes of children who had more time for school. Compulsory-attendance laws 【C22】______children to be in school to age fourteen, and swelling populations of immigrant and migrant children jammed schoolrooms. Before the Civil War, the curriculum had consisted chiefly of moral lessons. But in the late nineteenth century, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall and the philosopher John Dewey asserted that modern education ought to prepare children【C23】______. They insisted that personal development, not subject matter, should be the focus of the【C24】______. Education, argued Dewey, must relate directly to experience; children should be encouraged to discover knowledge for themselves. Learning 【C25】______to students' lives should replace rote memorization and outdated subjects. Progressive education, based on Dewey's books The School and Society(1899)and Democracy and Education(1916), was a uniquely American phenomenon. Dewey believed that learning should focus on real-life problems and that children should be taught to use their intelligence and ingenuity as 【C26】______for controlling their environments. From kindergarten through high school, Dewey asserted, children should learn 【C27】______direct experience. Dewey and his wife, Alice, put these ideas into【C28】______in their own Laboratory School, located at the University of Chicago. A more practical curriculum became the driving principle behind reform in higher education as well. Previously, the purpose of American colleges and universities had resembled that of European 【C29】______: to train a select few individuals for careers in law, medicine, teaching and religion. But in the late 1800s, institutions of higher learning multiplied. Curricula【C30】______as educators sought to make learning more appealing and to keep up with technological and social changes.