Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/390

 384 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

What, then^ are the resources of the community in these directions? Just as the geologist surveys the state, looking for its possible supplies of mineral wealth, or just as the forester searches out the remote re- sources of lumbering wealth, so the educational research men of the future will explore and survey the state for its hidden wealth of moral energy, youthful idealism, social purpose and individual promise hidden in village or city homes, working in quiet ways in the making of better communities, struggling with the untoward elements and crudities of social life everywhere. The state is rich in these hidden resources: men and women, especially young men and young women, and groups of all these, who are working with zeal and hope, yet with much in- direction, for larger and better things. The school must get over its academic tradition and get into an attitude of mind that will enable it to understand, appreciate, and give really intelligent direction to these partial movements. These are the real educational resources of the state. Here the future teachers will find their problems, their ir- spirations, and, if they have been trained to the development of a native intelligence, the tasks of life.

These are the real problen:i8 of educational research. How can our schools make organic connection with the educational hopes and pur- poses of their own local communities, and bring to those communities the intelligent direction that they lack, that they long for, that they must have, yet of which they are self-respectingly and narrowly sus- picious? How can these things be done? These are the tasks of that larger educational research that is opening before us, to-day. Here open the problems in educational psychology, not of the dry-as-dust sort, but of the vital, social sort, whose resxdts when found wiU have sig- nificance for education elsewhere. Here are the calls for long and in- telligent consideration by all the men and women who can be found. And results attained in these fields will have scientific value, social value, and practical value in the training of teachers.

Other aspects of this problem should be presented, but these phases of it show the scientific possibilities hidden in this field. Such a pro- gram of teacher-training, and educational research might win for the department the scientific standing that it longs for among the depart- ments of the university or college. At any rate such a program would indicate that the department had caught something of the spirit of real inquiry, the real spirit of science, and that it could really become scien- tific.

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