Charles McMurry, State Normal University, Normal, Ill.: In one of your statements read: “Your committee would call attention in this connection to the importance of the pedagogical principle of analysis and isolation as preceding synthesis and correlation.” Now, as I understand it, this is what this committee has attempted to report. Now, he says that this precedes synthesis or correlation. I would like to know if there is any dictionary or number of dictionaries to make correlation mean what this says—the analysis and isolation of subjects of study.
I have been very much afraid that Dr. Harris would take refuge in the discussion of the subject of the will in which he distinguishes Herbart from others. The exclusion of the will is held as far as Herbart is concerned of moral education. Now I wish to say that Herbart has laid down more and better educational principles than any other philosopher.
The more difficult thing is not exactly the best thing for the child in the first and second grades. There was an old theory among the Latins that if the child could be made to go through the difficulties of a Latin speech, it would prepare him for the difficult things to follow. Now, we wish to have life and not dead formalism. I believe that a thoughtful study of this report will convince any one who is interested in children that it is formal, and is a production of this old idea, based upon language as the foundation of all education.
President W. H. Hervey, Teachers’ College, New York: I find myself drawn in two directions on this question. I fain would cleave to everything that has been said this morning as containing the truth. I believe that, so far as this report and these remarks confine themselves to educational principles, any one of us may agree most heartily. Only where they descend to particular applications are we at variance. We always are at variance when we descend from the clouds, but that is no objection to the clouds. Now, I take it there are arrayed before us the two opposing camps,—the Hegelian and the Herbartian. What does the Hegelian say? In order that you may know the world you must turn your back upon yourself and lose yourself; you lose your life that you may save it. Yon leave your home plate, go to the second base, then to the third base, and you make a home run. That is a true type of all development. What, on the other hand, is the standpoint of the Herbartian? What we know depends upon what we have known. And that is true. And what we can do, according to this philosophy, depends upon the interest, the kinetic energy. About this matter of will, we have the Calvinistic theology set over against the Unitarian. Hegel’s Lord was a man of war. Herbart brings us to view the New Jerusalem. He shows us the church, not militant, but triumphant. Herbart distinguishes the good from the evil and makes it impossible for a man to do a wrong deed or to think a wrong thought, and that, I take it, is even a higher attainment than the Hegelian philosophy has thought of. Any one who develops the will by the man-of-war idea will have a sorry will upon his hands. There is, with the young child, certainly, a synthesis, a correlation, a development of taste where the analysis is suppressed and unconscious; and yet, my friends, if you attempt to educate a boy in the upper grammar grades or the high school according to the same principles as the primary grades, you make a sorry muss of it. If we would pass from the state of the child to the state of the man, it is necessary for us to go through the dry bones of analysis.
Dr. B. A. Hinsdale, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: There are two things which I wish very briefly to touch. First, I do not understand Dr. Harris, in speaking of Herbart and the will, to leave the subject in the form in which Dr. McMurry understood that matter. I understand that Herbart does not base morals open the will, but rather upon the feeling and the desires. Now, whether the will or the desires furnish a proper basis is a question I do not wish to discuss. Certainly, when any one says that the Doctor declared that Herbart does not take the question of morals into account he makes a mistake. I understand him to say that Herbart does not place morals upon the proper foundation. In regard to courses of study, there is no such thing as considering this question apart from criteria. Now, what are our criteria to be? That I do not propose to discuss, but where are we to seek for our criteria? For myself, I have been in the habit of discussing that subject in this way. These are to be found, in the first place, in the constitution of the human soul, and second, in the facts that constitute the environment of men. I do not say which is below the other. I do say that a serious mistake will be made by that pedagogist who leaves out either of these or gives either a very inferior position. As to how either presupposes the other, that is a very important question, but I cannot discuss it at more length.
Now as to the process of isolation—the first process of knowledge is to isolate things. We have certainly been taught that the first process of the mind is not a synthetic, but an analytic process. Every person coming into this hall took a view of it as a whole, and then began to isolate this thing from that, and then this process, after a time, ceased. But that there is to be no synthesis is a proposition which I do not understand to be in this report.
When a child comes to school you may divide the subjects which occupy his attention into two groups. The first are the elementary school arts,—as the improving of speech, the studies of reading, writing, drawing, and numerical calculations, if he has never entered upon these. They are not studies, they are the arts of the elementary school. We teach them, not for their own sake, but that they may be used as instruments. [Time called by the chairman, and extended by vote of the house.]