Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/289

Rh complexity of society demand more and more subtle forms of treatment, in order to cause justice to prevail among men, and at the same time not to arrest the evolution of society.

The layman usually feels more confident to give advice regarding education than he does regarding medicine or legislation or even religion; and this is the chief cause of the vast amount of conflict over teaching in these days. Those who are working on the inside, who may be said to have the expert point of view, are introducing changes in courses of study, in the methods of presenting subjects, and in the modes of organizing and conducting school systems, which they think are demanded in order to meet the changing conditions in the social organism. New subjects are being added in the belief that they are essential in order to give the pupil an appreciation of contemporary life. It is seen that the conditions for which the school must prepare its pupils are very different to-day from what they were fifty years ago; though the layman sometimes indicates his view of educational policy by saying that "the little red school house produced the greatest men the world has yet seen; and why not let good enough alone." He apparently does not consider that these men may have attained their greatness in spite of, or at least independent of, the school. As a matter of fact, some of the most distinguished of these men were self-taught.

The man immersed in affairs in his own field is apt not to take account of the fact that knowledge, practical knowledge, is rapidly increasing in many fields which were hardly opened up fifty years ago. Everything affecting human welfare is becoming more complex; and even if a relatively simple school régime a half-century ago was adapted to the needs of men in those days, such a régime might be entirely unsuited to the conditions of to-day. The student of education sees what has happened to society in the countries of the old world in which the school has kept to the simple, traditional curriculum. The pupils come out of the schools in such places quite unaware of much that exists in the world to-day, and they are unable to cope with modern conditions as created by progressive nations. If the advice of a large proportion of the lay and non-expert critics of the schools should be followed, it is as certain as anything can be that we should in a brief time, as such things go, come to an arrest in our development, much like that to be observed in Italy or Spain at the present time.

Of all the fault-finding regarding contemporary education, the most persistent is that which charges the schools with devoting much of their time and energy to "fads" and "notions." It is probable that some at least of those who write this criticism have never been inside a modern school building, and they doubtless have but a very imperfect conception of the principles underlying the evolution which is taking place in the curriculum, and in methods of teaching. Such men are apt to pose as authorities on every subject engaging the attention of people. They