Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/388

 382 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

velop an intelligence thftt is predominantly social^ rather than, as at present^ intellectual and remote? This problem seems the task of a course in the social psychology of education. We have to-day many psychologies of education. Some of these are merely moralizing re^ statements of old analytic psychologies. Others are socially useless statements of the results of modern laboratory research. An experi- mental chapter on memory is a valuable piece of work, and should be found in this social psychology — as a sort of footnote. This social psychology will be conscious of the social source of all educational ex- periences and it will look ahead to their social outcome. It will make use of laboratoiy results in stating the pure mechanics that may be needed in the processes of training. This will give meaning to labora- tory material, most of which is confessedly of no use at present to any teacher — from which, indeed, teachers have been rather severely warned — ^and this use of laboratory material will save analytic psychol- ogy from mere moralizing.

Beginning with the social conditions of experience and keeping always in mind the social outcome of experience, such a course as this should work out the main psychological pathways by which children may be assured a gradual development of a genuinely intelligent ex- perience, without at the same time losing the social quality, either of their experience or of their intelligence. This course, therefore, ou^t to offer to the student an effective psychological instrument for the analysis in social terms of the educational problems that will present themselves in the school room and community.

In the fourth place, there should be required of all students who ex- pect to teach, a constructive course in the social principles of education. This will probably involve either previous experience as teacher or parallel work as practise teacher. In this course the students should do all the work. The teacher^s function will be merely to keep con- stantly fresh, and stimulatingly active before the minds of the students, the question: ''What shall be my program as a teacher in the school?^' The history of education has given the perspective of present problems and conditions; the social aspects of education have given the broad, social outlook and the conditions within which the program of educa- tion must go on; the social psychology of education has analyzed, as much as may be, the methods and processes of a social intelligence. And on the concrete basis of previous experience or present practise, the student should now work out a constructive outline of his intended program as a teacher. This program should consist of the student's own individual organization of all his previous training, experience, study and intelligence, into a hypothetical plan which wiU sum up his present understanding and determination.

In this course, he should become conscious, as never before, of the

�� �