Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/334

 330 or peace until all this folk-lore had been subjected to scientific test; and it looks now as if the educational world was on the eve of a period of stress and struggle in the effort to examine the character of the foundations upon which all our theory and practise are built. The National Educational Association has established a fund for research; a society for the scientific study of education has been formed in our country; two or three of the universities have established chairs of educational research; a number of men have put themselves into training for the new work; and these are but preliminary signs of the impending revolution in the treatment of education.

And we shall need to start practically at the beginning in our research. Much, perhaps most, of contemporary educational opinion is in dispute, and we can not be certain where the truth lies. Take such a simple matter as the teaching of the three R's; while we are agreed that every child should gain some familiarity with these branches, yet we have the most diverse theories as to at what age we should introduce him to them, just what he should get from each, whether they should be acquired in isolation or correlated with other branches, how they may be most economically mastered, and so on ad libitum. For the asking, and even without it, we can get all sorts of opinions on these problems from all sorts of persons from college presidents up and down; but who among all these has resolved any one of these well-nigh infinitely complex questions into its elements, as scientific procedure demands, and observed it under varying conditions, so that its precise value could be determined? 'Common sense' does not realize that these problems are complex; it catches some shallow, immaterial aspect of any situation, and jumps to the easiest conclusion, missing most of the vital factors of the problem. Much of our traditional educational theory has been established in this way; it is in some such condition to-day, as natural science was when Bacon began applying exact methods to the study of natural phenomena. We have a great deal of hearsay knowledge about human development; but when one attempts to administer educational forces with precision, certainty and efficiency, he realizes how much guesswork there is in current pedagogical opinion. Science is only just beginning to touch questions of development at all; men in all fields of living nature have been concerned primarily with mature things, analyzing and dissecting and classifying. Even medicine has given us little of value regarding the healthful physical development of a human being. We have almost no precise knowledge respecting problems of food, clothing, sleep, exercise, the effects of school-life and the like upon an individual at different periods in his development. We have an unlimited body of conflicting lay opinion upon these matters, and a considerable body of conflicting expert (?) opinion as well; but if a layman who has children to bring up, say,