The Modern Educator's Library.
General Editor: Professor A. A. COCK.
The present age is seeing an unprecedented advance in educational theory and practice; its whole outlook on the ideals and methods of teaching is being widened. The aim of this new series is to present the considered views of teachers of wide experience, and eminent ability, upon the changes in method involved in this development, and upon the problems which still remain to be solved, in the several branches of teaching with which they are most intimately connected. It is hoped, therefore, that these volumes will be instructive not only to teachers, but to all who are interested in the progress of education.
Each volume contains an index and a comprehensive bibliography of the subject with which it deals.
EDUCATION: ITS DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES.
By T. PERCY NUNN, M.A., D.Sc.,
Professor of Education in the University of London; Author of "The Aims and Achievements of Scientific Method," "The Teaching of Algebra," Etc.
Crown 8vo. Cloth. 6s. net.
Dr. Nunn's volume really forms an introduction to the whole series, and deals with the fundamental questions which lie at the root of educational inquiry. The first is that of the aims of education. These, he says, are always correlative to ideals of life, and, as ideals of life are eternally at variance, their conflict will be reflected in educational theories. The individualism of post-reformation Europe gradually gave way to a reaction culminating in Hegel, which pictured the state as the superentity of which the single life is but a fugitive element. The logical result of this Hegelian ideal the world has just seen, and educators of to-day have to decide whether to foster this sinister tradition or to help humanity to escape from it to something better. What we need is a doctrine which, while admitting the importance of the social element in man, reasserts the importance of the individual.