Statements like these are very apt to be misconstrued or misinterpreted
unless one is very careful to define one's position; and, after what I
have said, I should do myself an injustice if I did not make certain
that my position is clear. I believe in experimentation in education. I
believe in experimental schools. But I should wish these schools to be
interpreted as experiments and not as models, and I should wish that the
failure of an experiment be accepted with good, scientific grace, and
not with the unscientific attitude of making excuses. The trouble with
an experimental school is that, in the eyes of the great mass of
teachers, it becomes a model school, and the principles that it
represents are applied _ad libitum_ by thousands of teachers who assume
that they have heard the last word in educational theory.
No one is more favorably disposed toward the rights of children than I
am, and yet I am thoroughly convinced that soft-heartedness accompanied
by soft-headedness is weakening the mental and moral fiber of hundreds
of thousands of boys and girls throughout this country. No one admires
more than I admire the sagacity and far-sightedness of Judge Lindsey,
and yet when Judge Lindsey's methods are proposed as models for school
government, I cannot lose sight, as so many people seem to lose sight,
of the contingent factor; namely, that Judge Lindsey's leniency is based
upon authority, and that if Judge Lindsey or anybody else attempted to
be lenient when he had no power to be otherwise than lenient, his
"bluff" would be called in short order. If you will give to teachers and
principals the same power that you give to the police judge, you may
well expect them to be lenient. The great trouble in the school is
simply this: that just in the proportion that leniency is demanded,
authority is taken away from the teacher.
And I should perhaps say a qualifying word with regard to my attitude
toward educational theory. I have every feeling of affection for the
science of psychology. I have every faith in the value of psychological
principles in the interpretation of educational phenomena. But I also
recognize that the science of psychology is a very young science, and
that its data are not yet so well organized that it is safe to draw from
them anything more than tentative hypotheses which must meet their final
test in the crucible of practice. Some day, if we work hard enough,
psychology will become a predictive science, just as mathematics and
physics and chemistry and, to a certain extent, biology, are predictive
sciences to-day. Meantime psychology is of inestimable value in giving
us a point of view, in clarifying our ideas, and in rationalizing the
truths that empirical practice discovers. A very few psychological
principles are strongly enough established even now to form the basis of
prediction. Among the most important of these are the laws of habit
building, some laws of memory, and the larger principles of attention.
Successful educational practice is and must be in accord with these
indisputable tenets. But the bane of education to-day is in the
pseudo-science, the "half-baked" psychology, that is lauded from the
house-tops by untrained enthusiasts, turned from the presses by
irresponsible publishing houses, and foisted upon the hungry teaching
public through the ever-present medium of the reading circle, the
teachers' institute, the summer school, and I am very sorry to admit
(for I think that I represent both institutions in a way) sometimes by
the normal schools and universities.
Most of the doctrines that are turning our practice topsy-turvy have
absolutely no support from competent psychologists. The doctrine of
spontaneity and its attendant _laissez-faire_ dogma of school government
is thoroughly inconsistent with good psychology. The radical extreme to
which some educators would push the doctrine of interest when they
maintain that the child should never be asked to do anything for which
he fails to find a need in his own life,--this doctrine can find no
support in good psychology. The doctrine that the preadolescent child
should understand thoroughly every process that he is expected to reduce
to habit before that process is made automatic is utterly at variance
with long-established principles which were well understood by the
Greeks and the Hebrews twenty-five hundred years ago, and to which
Mother Nature herself gives the lie in the instincts of imitation and
repetition. It is conceivable that these radical doctrines were
justified as means of reform, especially in secondary and higher
education, but, even granting this, their function is fulfilled when the
reform that they exploited has been accomplished. That time has come
and, as palpable untruths, they should either be modified to meet the
facts, or be relegated to oblivion.