Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/386

 38o THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

education that will develop this outeome? Such a program. Bet over against the intellectual and traditional one dcBcribed above, may be called social, and will, of course, be worthy of the name of science. And this outcome can be secured.

Such a program will accept the propositions that the pupils in the schools must have a larger freedom for constructive self-activity and creative self-expression; and that teachers must be prepared to organize schools that will provide such opportunities. But such a program will recognize this fact, seemingly overlooked by the traditionalist, that the teacher, who is to provide freedom of initiative for pupils in the schools, may rightly claim something of the same freedom of initia- tive while in preparation; that, therefore, the work of the department of education, instead of being more rigid and fixed, should be more open and free ; planned, not to finish the student's mental life with fixed answers and final attitudes, but to make that mind more alert, more independent, more able to recognize problems, more capable in the raising of new questions, more able to discern the valuable from the trivial, more efScient in the analysis of conditions and in the selection of solutions. In a word, the department of education will aim to secure in its students (who are to be the teachers of the future) the development of the powers of effective, analytic, and constructivie thinkers. Angell analyzes this power as follows:

Oar effectiveness as practical reasonen (or theoretical reasoners, for that matter) wiU depend then, first upon the skiU with which we succeed in conceiv- ing the problem correctly, and second, upon the speed and accuracy with which this conception suggeets to our reasoning processes the recall of the special ideas appropriate to the case at hand.*

A department of education that wants to be scientific will, then, train its students to look for problems, not answers; for the growing educational situations, not the finished conclusions; and for the larger and inclusive conditions of education, rather than for the finished de- tails of a traditional educational craftsmanship. Science believes in intelligence: when the problem has been clearly stated and conceived, the solution is not far away, and can be expected to follow in due time. It is not the business of the teacher to supply answers; enough that he helps the pupil to grasp the problem !

The purpose of the department, therefore, ought always to be to stimulate the mental life of the pupil (the future teacher) rather than to deaden thai mental life; to release the energies, the imaginations, and the deeper appreciations of the student rather than, by cramming the student with the results of investiga4ion8 in various lines, to make his mind more sodden and inflexible. For the purposes of this prob- lem-developing type of training, four general introductory lines of work, which have a certain logical relationship to each other, are possible.

« Angell, "Psychology," p. 281.

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