Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/335

 Rh should consult all these opinions in the hope of getting some aid in his task, he would be more likely to be confused than enlightened. Take the current standard literature on the feeding of children, for instance, and you will find exactly opposite opinions expressed upon the most vital matters by equally 'eminent authorities'; and you will discover that we have but little on this subject which has been worked out with due regard to scientific accuracy. The trouble is that a man who may be an authority in some phase of the malfunctioning of the adult organism, but who has made no exact studies upon the developing organism, does not hesitate to dogmatize about the latter in the light of his experience with the former. While doubtless he may be partially right in his views, still what we now need is precision as a result of special research in the field of human development, physical as well as intellectual and moral. Here is the great necessity and the great opportunity for research.

Doubtless one, and it may be the principal, reason why research in education has lagged far behind that in many other fields is because the practical work of instruction has absorbed the attention and energies of educators. There has been so much to do in carrying out the conventional educational regime that men have not had leisure to even investigate the foundations of this regime. Teachers are always confronted by situations where something must be done immediately, and they are compelled to act in view of what seems traditionally best. It is not permitted them to doubt the validity of the principles transmitted to them, for to doubt is to become static, and the great public demands action of a clearly obvious nature. Then naturally, of course, when the teacher acts on a principle through necessity, he becomes its exponent and defendant, and easily convinces himself that it is sound, and in this way he helps to pass it on as truth to his associates. Heretofore there has been no body of men in education, as there has been in other fields, who have been sheltered from the urgency of people of utilitarian impulses and needs, and who have been given leisure to work out problems without feeling that principles and rules of practical value must be elaborated at once right out of hand. In physics and chemistry and agriculture and medicine and other departments there are men at work who devote all their time and energies to original investigation, and they are not coerced into forming hasty opinions in order to gratify a public demand; but it is quite different in education. The supreme need to-day in this latter department is the development of a body of investigators who will be recognized as such, and who will be protected from the importunities of the practical people about them. Taken as a whole, the universities, some of which make reasonably liberal provision for research in the physical sciences, agriculture, medicine and the like, make no provision whatever for research in education.