Method the Object Sought.
Personally I am in hearty sympathy with the new educational theory that attributes more importance to method than to matter. Professor Lanson, of the University of Paris, the distinguished historian of French literature, has given so satisfactory a formulation of the aims of this theory in its application to secondary education that I cannot do better than reproduce his statement.[1]
“Now it is necessary,” he writes, “to prove that what we need to-day is minds scientifically trained. Let us understand by this word (scientifically) that sounds so ambitious, minds that have the taste or the sense for the true, that carry into all their actions a serious desire for clear and exact knowledge, that are conscious of the difficulties and dangers that one encounters in the pursuit of or in the elaboration of truth, that distrusting everybody, themselves as well as others, take all the precautions indicated in each case in order not to deceive themselves or to be deceived: these precautions are what we call methods. The methodical search for truth? There, in a word, is what the scientific spirit means and to make it dominate in secondary education is to subordinate all studies to the idea that their common end, their convergent directions ought to be to fashion minds that all their lives, in all things will know how to practice the methodical search for truth.... In every study and exercise, the aim of the master ought to be to develop in the minds of his pupils the sense and the taste for truth, to cause them to note how in each subject the truth is found or missed, to put them, finally, in possession of a certain method or discipline appropriate to a certain object. It is not a matter of having them learn a large number of laws or facts, but, by well-chosen examples, to learn what a mathematical truth is and how it is elaborated; likewise a chemical truth, a physiological truth, an astronomical truth and a historical truth. How does each of these truths of different orders come into existence? By what means does it separate itself from other truths? What are the signs by which we recognize it as truth? There is the knowledge that ought to be the principal result of their studies. The young people ought to leave the high school having learned well what the principal methods are by which human knowledge is formed and to what objects, for what results, each method is applied. They ought, on leaving school, to be trained to do nothing without method, without a method chosen with discernment, according to the object to be known or the end to be attained.”
This appeals to me as the application to education of the best recent thought in philosophy and logic. Now the interesting thing is that in this country, where the mass of the teachers would probably reject the theory and where supreme emphasis is being laid on the acquisition of information as the goal of educational effort, the teachers of natural science are doing the very thing the theory demands, namely, teaching methods or processes by which one can get at the truth or test what is supposed to be the truth in natural science, and giving along with the knowledge of these processes but a modicum of information. The information acquired in a laboratory course is not sufficient to justify the time given to the course. But it is not necessary to justify it on any such ground. M. Lanson has given the theory of which this natural science laboratory work is the application. It only remains to become conscious of what it means, to extend the same method to other studies and a great revolution has been wrought in education, perhaps the greatest in the history of pedagogy.