Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/383

 COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION 377

��CAN A COLLEGE DEPABTMENT OP EDUCATION BECOME

SCIENTIFIC ?

Bt JOSEPH K. HABT

T^EPABTMENTS of education in colleges and universities have -■-^ been made the objects of a good deal of more or less good-natured criticism and some ridicule within recent years. For example, Pro- fessor Gayley has denied the utility of such departments altogether, de- claring that teaching is '^ a profession that demands not so much method as scholarship and innate aptitude/'^

Professor Warner Fite, too, has taken occasion to express a rather definite view of the same sort. He says :

What the public school teacher especially needs to leam, and what the uni- versity is especially caUed upon to teach him, is just thi»-Hhat his real effi- ciency as a teacher, cmd his ability to speak to his boys and girls from the standpoint of personal and social authority, will depend in the last analysis, not upon any mastery of the ''formal principles of method," or what not, but upon the evidence in himself of a thoughtful attitude toward life.s

What such writers are attempting to demonstrate is, of course, largely true, though expressed in intolerant terms. Departments of education, as distinguished from schools of education and teachers' colleges, have not yet fully found themselves. Educational theory is, on the whole, becoming rather securely based. But in its practical out- come it does not always realize its own inner logic and, therefore, falls under the criticism or ridicule of those, who, working in older and better established fields, sometimes forget the ways over which their own subjects won to recognition, and express themselves in terms not alto- gether worthy of scientific men.

Dewey's estimate of the function of such departments seems more nearly correct. He says:

That some teachers get their (theory) by instinct more effectively than others by any amount of reflective study may be unreservedly stated. It is not a question of manufacturing teachers, but of reinforcing and enlightening those who have a right to teach.*

Why, then, have departments of education been criticized in this way? There are at least three reasons.

In the first place, criticism has been the fate of all new departures from tradition, of all new movements. It is natural, normal and neces- sary for the proper organization of the new departure and for the prun-

1 "Idols," p. 138 ff.

« Fite, in The Nation, VoL 93, p. 207-8.

s Dewey, "Psychology and Social Practise."

VOL. m. — ^26.

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