Copyright, 1900
by
J. B. Lippincott Company
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.
EDITOR’S PREFACE
The progress of educational thought during the closing years of this century has been marvellous. Professional schools have created a demand for professional teaching by giving an increasing group of skilled instructors to our schools. This professional activity has caused our leading cities to provide training-schools, as integral parts of the city system of education. Finally, our great universities have established departments of pedagogy for the higher training in education. As a result, the leading positions in higher schools and in supervision are more and more demanding professionally trained leaders.
In this auspicious awakening for professional leadership there has come an increasing demand for standard treatises upon the fundamental problems of education. Treatises upon the history, methods, principles, and systems of education have appeared with astonishing frequency. That many of these are commercial treatises—made to sell—is doubtless true. There is always a great temptation to profit by an active demand. Well-disposed but not always widely trained and broadly cultured teachers, who have achieved a local success with a method that owed its virtue to the personality of its author and not to its intrinsic worth, have been tempted into authorship. The wiser and nobler minds in the profession wait. The days of unrest and experimentation, breeding discord and confusion, have in part passed away, and the time has come when the products of all this divergent activity may be put to the test of clear analysis and adequate experience. This is especially true in the domains of historic and philosophic inquiry. In experimental activity, touching the problems of psychic life as related to its sensorium, much has been done in a tentative way. Much must yet be done to produce results of enduring significance.
This series of educational treatises is projected to give inquiring minds the best thought of our present professional life. Fundamental problems in education will be exhibited in the series from time to time by thoroughly trained leaders of extended experience. Teachers may confidently accept these as authoritative discussions of the cardinal questions of their profession.
The highest endowment of the human spirit on the intellectual side is the power to think. Learning to think is an essential process and end in all school work. Thinking is the intellect’s regal activity. In a vague way, all teaching appeals to the thought-activity of the pupil; but vagueness in teaching is as pernicious as it is common. To exhibit the value, scope, and process of thought is of inestimable service to the teacher. It gives specific direction to teaching processes, and saves the child from a thousand fanciful expedients.
In the craze of the passing decade for novelty in teaching, there has resulted an undue emphasis upon forms of so-called expressional activity. It has been, in many quarters, forgotten that education is noblest when it produces reflective activity. The power to analyze and synthetize thought-complexes is the most fruitful endowment of the intellectual life. Expression without adequate reflection is productive of superficiality.