The essence of the scientific spirit is to view experience without
prejudice, and that was the lesson that I learned from the school system
of St. Louis.
The difference between the ideal child and the real child,--the
difference between what fancy pictures a schoolroom to be and what
actual first-hand acquaintance shows that it is, the difference between
a preconceived notion and an actual stubborn fact of experience,--these
were among the lessons that I learned in these schools. But, at the same
time, there was no crass materialism accompanying this teaching. There
was no loss of the broader point of view. A fact is a fact, and we
cannot get around it,--and this is what scientific method has insisted
upon from its inception. But always beyond the fact is its significance,
its meaning. That the St. Louis schools have for the last fifty years
stood for the larger view; that they have never, so far as I know,
exploited the new and the bizarre simply because it was new and
strange,--this is due, I believe, to the insight and inspiration of the
man[13] who first fashioned the framework of this system, and breathed
into it as a system the vitalizing element of idealism. Personally, I
have not always been in sympathy with the teachings of the Hegelian
philosophy,--I have not always understood them,--but no man could
witness the silent, steady, unchecked growth of the St. Louis schools
without being firmly and indelibly impressed with dynamic value of a
richly conceived and rigidly wrought system of fundamental principles.
The cause of education has suffered much from the failure of educators
to break loose from the shackles of the past. But it has, in some
places, suffered still more from the tendency of the human mind to
confuse fundamental principles with the shackles of tradition. The rage
for the new and the untried, simply because it is new and untried,--this
has been, and is to-day, the rock upon which real educational progress
is most likely to be wrecked. This is a rock, I believe, that St. Louis
has so far escaped, and I have no doubt that its escape has been due, in
large measure, to the careful, rigid, laborious, and yet illuminating
manner in which that great captain charted out its course.