Culture, discipline and democracy

Chapter I

The Present Status of Culture Discipline and Direct Preparation FOR Life ii

I. Conditions Resulting in Reaction Toward Academic Specialization, ii. — 2. The Lessening Confidence in Formal Discipline, 17. — 3. The Increasing Demand for Direct Preparation for Life, 19. — 4. Increased Willingness for Readjustment, 20. — 5. Readjustment Must Be Determined by Scientific Research, 23. — 6. Direct Preparation for Life More Certain Than General Discipline, 24. — 7. Either Academic or Vocational Specialization May Be Hostile to Culture and Democracy, 25. — 8. The Mutual Interdependence of Direct Preparation for Life and General Discipline, 29.

Chapter II

An Analysis of "Formal Discipline" into Essential Phases OF Formal Self-activity — Including General Discipline 30

I. The Aim of Education Useful Self-activity, 30. — 2. Educational or Formal Phases of Self-activity Distinguished from Its Psychological Forms, 33. — 3. The Five Educational or Formal Phases of Self-activity, 33. — 4. Distinction between Direct and Indirect Furtherance of the Educational Aim, 35. — 5. Cumulative Impression, 36. — 6. Initial Remembrance, 40. — 7. Varying Apperception, 47. — 8. Specific Discipline, 57. — 9. General Discipline, 76.

CHAPTER III A Discussion of the Conditions Favorable to General Discipline 79

I. Extent of General Discipline Dependent Upon Occurrence of the General Stimulus, 79. — 2. Necessity for Determining the Extent to Which it is Useful, 82. — 3. Continuity Its First Condition, 83. — 4. As General a Stimulus as'^is Useful, the Second, 85. — 5. The Third, Permanent Association of the General Stimulus with Typical Applications, 90. — 6. The Fourth, the Habit of Seeking Unaccustomed Applications, 91. — 7. The Fifth, Emotionalizing of the General Stimulus, 93. — 8. The Sixth, Its Varying Apperception, 96. — 9. The Seventh, the Knowledge Necessary to Its Identification and Application, 98. — 10. The Eighth, the Habit of Analysis and Synthesis on the Recognition of Any Part of

It, lOI.

IV CONTENTS

Chapter IV Page

The Comparative Uselessness of the Old "Disciplinary" or "Formal" Subjects to All Phases of Formal Self-activity Except Specific Discipline no

I. The Usefulness of an Idea or Activity Dependent Upon the Relationships in Which It Is Recalled, no. — 2. Mode of Measuring Their Usefulness, in. — 3. The General Course of Study Must Emphasize Subjects Containing High Proportion of Directly Useful Material, 112. — 4. The Study of the Formal Subjects But Little Favorable to Phases of Formal Self-activity Other Than Specific Discipline, 113. — 5. The Limited Formal Self -activity Resulting From the Elementary Study of a Foreign Language, 114. — 6. The Limitations to the Formal Value of Mathematical Study, 116. — 7. Varying Apperception Furthered by the Presentation of the Most Many-sided and Recurring Relationships Wherever Found, 119. — 8. Material Organized for Direct Furtherance Most Useful to Varying Apperception, 120. — 9. Recapitulation of the Advantages of Direct Preparation Over the Formal Branches in the Furtherance of General Discipline, 120. — 10. General Conclusions Concerning the Course of Study, 122. — II. The Greater Part of Mathematics, Exclusive of Arithmetic, Must Be Eliminated from the Required General Course, 123. — 12. Foreign Languages Should Be Required Only of Those to Whose Specialization They are Essential, 126. — 13. The Place of the Natural Sciences in the General Course, 130. — 14. Increased Representation of Subjects Rich in Humanistic Content, 132. — 15. The Use of Selected Portions of Academic Branches No Menace to Discipline, 132. — 16. The Partial Subject Matter Selected Can Usually Be Organized Academically, as Well as for Direct Preparation, 134.

CHAPTER V The Interdependence of Culture and Direct Preparation

FOR Life 136

I. Culture Itself a Partial Phase of Direct Preparation for Life, 137. — 2. The Essential Factors in Culture, 137. — 3. Selection and Specialization Necessary in Culture Itself, 138. — 4. Specialization in Culture Must Be Preceded by a Culture Common to All Educated Individuals, 140. — 5. Culture Must Further Other Phases of the Educational Aim, 140. — 6. A General Culture Related to Vocation Should Parallel All Vocational Specialization, and Direct Preparation, All Specialization in Culture, 143. — 7. Undemocratic to Develop Artistic Expression at the Expense of Aesthetic Appreciation, 144. — 8. The Rapid Multiplication of Means for Developing a Common Aesthetic Appreciation, 147. — 9. Instruction in Aesthetics Should Be Distinct from Other Phases of Instruction Which Interfere with It, 152. — 10. Both Direct|Preparation and General Discipline Must Include a Part of the Content Most Useful for Culture, 156. — II. Culture Not Only Included in Direct Preparation, but Dependent Upon It, 158. — 12. The Study of Greek and Latin Belongs to Specialization, 160. — 13. The Test of Relative Worth Determines the Cultural Material Which Should Be Required of All, 162. — 14. No Ground Remains for Excluding From Higher Education the Students Who Fail in the Old Formal Subjects, 163.

CONTENTS V

Chapter VI Page

Uniformity for Various Localities in the General Course OF Study Limited to the Essential Relationships Which Must Be Certainly Memorized 165

I. The Fundamental Nature of the Distinction Between Essential and Optional Relationships, 165. — 2. An Exact Determination of Relative Worth Unnecessary, 166. — 3. Courses of Study, While Uniform in Their Essential Relationships, are Identical in the Relative Usefulness of Their Optional Relationships Rather Than in the Optional Relationships Themselves, 167. — 4. The Certain Memorizing of Essential Relationships a Necessary Condition to the Mastery of Optional Material, 169. — 5. Ignorance of Essential Relationships Too Severe a Penalty for Carelessness or Incompetence, 171. — 6. For the Sake of Both Individual and State Essential Knowledge Must Be Compelled in School, 171. — 7. Specialization Varying With Individuals Should Parallel Direct Preparation in General and Be Paralleled by It, 172.

CHAPTER Vn

The Inadequacy of Tests for the Mere Elimination of Harmful, Specialized, or Impracticable Material from THE Course of Study i7q

I. Dr. McMurry's Test for Elimination Suggestive Rather than Determining, 179. — 2. A More Adequate Test for Total Rejection or Exclusion of Particular Relationships, 181. — 3. Necessity for the Further Exclusion of Material Hostile to the Educational Aim, 181. — 4. Necessity for the Further Exclusion and Continual Rejection of All That is Not Useful to the Majority of Individuals Who Are Not Specialists, 183. — 5. All Material Must Be Rejected Which is Being Effectively Taught Outside the School, or Which Cannot Be Effectively Taught in the School, 187.

Chapter VIII

Application of the Test of Relative Worth from the Standpoint OF All Formal Self-activity Which is Indirectly Useful 191

I. Application of the Test to Relationships Intended to Further Cumulative Impression, igi. — 2. Relative Worth from the Standpoint of Mere Remembrance, 195. — 3. Genetic Conditions Determining Only for Optional Material, igS. — 4. Words the Most Useful Material from the Standpoint of Mere Remembrance, 200. — 5. Application of the Test for Selection to Varying Apperception, 213. — 6. Application of the Test for Relative Value to General Discipline, 225.

vi CONTENTS

Chapter IX Page

Application of the Test of Relative Worth to Specific , Discipline, with the Consequent Determination of a Cumulative and Dominating System, Both Directly and Indirectly Useful 237

I. Specific Discipline as Essential to Formal Self-activity as to Direct Preparation and Specialization, 237. — 2. Application of the Test to Direct Preparation for the Various Phases of the Educational Aim, 239. — 3. Determination of the Relative Worth of Specific Relationships Results in Specific System, 245. — 4. Application of the Test to Academic Organization, 260. — 5. The Reorganization of the Course of Study Into a Dynamic System of Essentially Useful Relationships, 267. — 6. Application of the Test to Specialization, 271. — 7. Specialization in Portions of Mathematics a Necessary Preparation for Many Vocations, 274. — 8. Specialization in Some Modern Language Broadens Apperception ,Is Helpful to the Majority of Vocations, and Desirable from the Standpoint of Avocation, 276. — 9. Even Specialization in Avocation Determined by the Test of Relative Worth, 278. — 10. Only the Test for Relative Worth Can Determine the Relative Part to Be Played by General Education and Specialization, 280.

Chapter X

The Continuity Necessary to a Cumulative and Dominating System to Be Ensured Primarily Through Direct Preparation and. Secondarily, Through Specialization 282

I. From the Standpoint of Continuity Habit Must Be Considered in at Least Four Degrees of Complexity, 282. — 2. The Impracticability of Vocational Specialization as a Means to Continuity, 285. — 3. More Likelihood of Continuity Through Academic Specialization Strengthened by Varying Vocational Motive, 286. — 4. Continuity Practicable and at the Same Time Most Useful Only Through the Progressive and Cumulative Organization of the Material Most Directly Useful to All, 289. — 5. Early Opportunity for Specialization Should Re- enforce the Continuity Based on Direct Preparation for Life in General, 290. — 6. The Specific Discipline Involved in Direct Preparation for Life Necessary to Increase the Probability of Usefulness of Every Form of Indirect Instruction, 292. — 7. The "Old" Education and the "New" Complementary, 294. — 8. Continuity and Concentration Through Specialization Must Supplement Direct Preparation for Lite in General and Be Related to It, 296. — 9. The Development of Education as a Science Necessary Both to Democracy and Christian Civilization, 298.

Foreword

If I had been writing wholly from the standpoint of educational tradition, the title of this book would have been Democracy through Culture and Discipline. For the first step taken toward democratic education was to ensure intelligent citizenship by making the culture and discipline, which in the past had been reserved for privileged social classes, accessible to the whole people through a system of free schools. Writing as I have done, wholly as an investigator who records in as logical order as he can the results of his inquiry, a truer title for my work as it reaches its completion would be Culture and Discipline through Direct Preparation for Democracy. For from the standpoint of culture and discipline as distinct from democracy, I have been forced to see that for the majority of individuals who do not continue to lead the life of academic specialists, no discipline can be lasting or culture continuing which is not closely related to every-day life. And to an education which is democratic only in its opportunity, I have gradually come to add education which is democratic, on the one hand, in its ideals, its subject matter, its organization and its method, and on the other, in compulsion which demands not only that each individual shall have through compulsory school attendance the rudiments of academic knowledge, but, through the compulsion of repetition, every detail of culture and discipline essential to usefulness to the community and the state.

That is, purely academic training, with its general information, general culture, and general discipline, has proved itself

Vll

VlU FOREWORD

to be not only an uncertain preparation for citizenship, dependent for its own usefulness upon more direct preparation for life, but to depend even for its continuity as habit and system upon its relationship to the every-day experience of ordinary people.

It is, after all, the fundamental changes which the last hundred years have made in the every-day experience of the masses that are responsible for the educational readjustment of which we are just becoming fully conscious. Not only democracy, but the transformation of industrial life, increasing leisure, a higher standard of living, the broadening of social service, and the almost inconceivable extension of the domain of human knowledge are compelling a different kind of education. More than this, as slowly but surely the compulsion of scientific determination is added to that of social readjustment, individual opinion in educational practice must yield to the truth laid bare by analysis, research, and experimentation, as tradition is yielding to changing life and civilization.

Meanwhile, our national educational policy is being widely influenced by two classes of extremists — traditionalists, to whom a liberal education means a discipline and culture remote from life; and iconoclasts, to whom preparation for life is limited to a vocational training which has no time for general disciphne or culture. Not only is an open mind one of the highest products of civilization and education, but there is probably no field of investigation, and especially of readjustment, in which it is more difiicult to maintain it than in that of education itself. Not merely what is taught, but the method by which it is imparted, becomes a part of one's personality and tends to dominate it, if not through an adequate discipline, at least in point of view. As the life of a particular individual is crowned with success, the vocational training or the general education which prepared for it appears to him to be justified by the logic of experience itself, while the particular form of culture which he possesses, as it raises him above routine, becomes a part of his faith and his

FOREWORD ix

idealism. Indeed, a strong mind cannot be an open one if it is not also analytic. The traditionalist cannot be justlycalled upon to surrender old beliefs as wholes which are, after all, partial truths, or to accept new ones as wholes which too often represent hasty generalizations as well as scientifically determined facts. Nor can the iconoclast see the partial truths in an old belief when he fails to see it in its parts, or tolerate criticisms of the new when he cannot discriminate between its generalizations and its facts.

This is why, in a period of transition from a variety of deductive educational systems to education as an inductive science, it is so difficult for us to follow "the argument whithersoever it may lead." Fortunate it is for human progress that as educational science is beginning to analyze and experiment, philosophy is becoming pragmatic, culture more truly liberal, and experience expectant and receptive through the continual contributions of discovery and invention to the every-day life of the people. Whether or not each individual is able to meet readjustment with an open mind, the ultimate triumph of analysis, experimentation, and research is sure.

The discussion which is to follow is not so much an attempted solution of the educational problem, as an effort to formulate it. It seeks to analyze the vague presuppositions and generalizations of current debate, and to apply to existing theory and practice the definite facts and propositions upon which a multitude of partial or uncertain truths are collectively based. The result is not an assemblage of deductive conclusions, but a thousand and one specific problems which only experimentation and research can solve. Obviously, if at each stage of the argument the reader is unable to follow the analysis, if he substitutes his accustomed ideas for tentative though cumulative conclusions on which further discussion is based, he will utterly fail to take the successive steps necessary to an intelligent comprehension of the problem as a whole. At best, with an open mind, he can share the writer's hope that both tentative conclusions and the

FOREWORD highly organized system of direct preparation which they appear to justify may soon be put to scientifically valid test. In the educational field, as elsewhere, the compulsion of science must be substituted for that of tradition and displace the individualism which, like that of Protagoras, still makes individual man the measure of all things.

Chapter I

THE PRESENT STATUS OF CULTURE DISCIPLINE AND DIRECT PREPARATION FOR LIFE

I. Conditions Which Have Resulted in a Reaction Toward Academic Specialization

If not quite unknown to the mass of thinkers, at least in utter absence of that general interest which a realization of their consequences would call forth, two revolutionary tendencies are becoming dominant in educational practice — a continually increasing demand for direct and specific training for definite activities of life and a lessening confidence in the certainty and efficiency of formal discipline. This lack of popular interest is more remarkable from the fact that the present educational crisis is a direct and gradual development of the educational movement of the nineteenth century.

The beginning of the century was marked by a many-sidedness of achievement which widely extended the domain of human knowledge and broadened the range of human interests. It was a period of successful exploration, discovery, and invention, of political revolution, and moral, religious, and social reform. As the revival of ancient learning stimulated sixteenth century scholars to the activities which constitute the Renaissance, so Australasia and the South Sea Islands, Harvey's circulation of the blood and Priestley's discovery of oxygen, the invention [^^^8^111 of the spinning jenny, the steam engine and the knowledge locomotive, the rise of manufactures, the French at beginning Revolution and electoral reform, Wesleyanism, century, temperance societies, homes for the deaf and dumb, abolition, phrenology — these, and many equally potent factors in a changing civilization, united to compel a truer and fuller educational readjustment as yet in its beginning, in whose completion the Renaissance itself will become complete. In America the public school system was created. In England, after the failure of Lord Brougham's Commission to establish a national school system, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was formed, and, through Penny Encyclopedia and Penny Magazine, began its systematic and determined effort to give the new knowledge to the masses. Equally enthusiastic and persistent attempts were naturally made^to introduce it into the school curriculum. The elaborate course proposed in all seriousness by Jeremy Bentham, in which this enthusiasm had its culmination, must be presented in its entirety in order to show the quantitative extreme which was reached:^

Elementary Arts. — Reading, writing, arithmetic.

First Stage (Age Seven). — Mineralogy, botany, zoology, geography, geometry (definitions only), history, chronol- Its press- ogy, drawing.

ure upon Second Stage (Age Eight). — Same subjects,

Third Stage (Age Nine). — Subjects of previous stages and mining, geology, land-surveying, architecture, husbandry, including the theory of vegetation and gardening.

Physical economics — i. e., the application of mechanics and chemistry to domestic management, involving "maximization of bodily comfort in all its shapes, minimization of bodily discomfort in all its shapes," — biography.

Fourth Stage (Age Ten). — Hygiastics (art of preserving and restoring health), comprising physiology, anatomy, pathology, nosology, dietetics, materia medica, prophylactics (art of warding off evils), surgery, therapeutics; zohygiastics (art of taking care of animals).

Fifth Stage (Age Eleven). — Geometry (with demonstrations), algebra, mathematical geography, astronomy. Technology, or arts and manufactures in general. Bookkeeping, or the art of registration or recordation. Commercial bookkeeping. Note-taking.

To all this a certain Mr. Simpson adds:

Sixth Stage (Age Twelve). — History, government, commerce. Political economy. Philosophy of the human mind.

It is this impossible scheme that is used by Joseph Payne to illustrate the fallacy that, because there is so much to be learned in the world, children must learn it all in school.^ It is absurd only when, in the light of the modern course of study, one thinks of the limitations and inefficiency of the early charity schools. When one turns to the course of study of the Winchesters and Etons for which it is intended, with the whole of boyhood and young manhood devoted to an equally quantitative study of Latin and of Greek, Jeremy Bentham's substitute does not appear quite so extraordinary.

The actual defense of the traditional curriculum against the onslaught of the new knowledge was the inertia of school men trained through the old content, together with not a little of the religious prejudice which was so potent a factor in the defeat of Lord Brougham's reforms. It was not until the latter years of Mr. Spencer's life that the charge of irreligiousness, brought, for example, against Horace Mann and the Combes, was toned down to such an extent that he expressed his surprise at its almost utter absence.

The theoretical defense against a many-sided curriculum in the beginning and, as conservatism began to yield and religious prejudice softened, the only defense was its check the theory of formal discipline. It, too, reached by formal an extreme which perhaps contrasts itself most *^"^ ^^^' sharply with Jeremy Bentham's in Joseph Payne's insistence that "in order to train the mind usefully, concentration and not accumulation must be our guiding principle — in other words, we must direct the most strenuous e^orts of our pupils to the complete and full comprehension of some one subject as an instrument of intellectual discipline.''^ Since this one subject must itself be many-sided in the activities wliich it calls forth, and must be closely connected with human interests and feelings, Mr. Payne concentrated upon Latin, as opposed to mathematics or natural science. That is, in common with Thomas Arnold^ and W. T. Harris,^ he gave Latin prominence, not, with modern Hellenists, on account of a liberal culture remote from life, but because of a humanism and universality which make possible the many-sided relation to modern life, without which the habits fixed with the aid of concentration cannot be generally applied.

Champions of formal discipline are not yet urging manysidedness as necessary to the general application of the

habits which constitute specific disciphne. On che^ck to ^^^ contrary, they are beginning to perceive that discipline, in failing to insist upon an extreme concentration, decreasing logically inevitable if discipline is to be given by ^Qjj^ branches of knowledge taken as wholes, they

ignored one condition fundamental to the fixed habits without which formal discipline is impossible. Mr. Payne himself necessarily prepared the way for a diversity fatal to concentration through a single formal subject by admitting that other subjects than Latin have disciplinary value, and must be included in so far as they do not interfere with concentration upon the subject selected as the main instrument of discipline.*^ A few years later Alexander Bain, with his keen power of analysis, pointed out in a general way the activities developed by each branch, and demonstrated once for all that Latin develops no activity which cannot be developed by some other subject of study .^ This left no effective defense against the individualism of genetic psychology which, re-enforcing that of Rousseau and later itself re-enforced by Herbartianism, appeared to give scientific sanction to the elective system. So to Latin and, in the secondary school at least, a critical study of EngHsh have been added not only the modern languages, but the natural sciences and numerous other subjects, all justified, at least in part, on the plea of discipline, and all so ineffectively taught, from the disciplinary point of view, as to result in generally admitted failure. Hence, Woodrow Wilson's reference to the social sideshows that interfere with the main performance,^ and President Lowell's reactionary modification of the elective system at Harvard. The former's most characteristic stand is for concentration on academic work in general through a lessening of distractions and a closer supervision of study; the latter's, for concentration through academic specialization.

The recent recommendations of the Carnegie Foundation concerning college entrance requirements point in the latter direction — concentration on two or three subjects, ,

with free range in a variety of others.^ Professor concentra- Isaac Schwatt took a still more consistent and tion not the courageous step when he suggested before the ^^ ^tve. ^^' New England Association of Teachers of Mathematics that high school pupils who are not looking forward to specialization in some subject requiring applied mathematics, can be given the discipline peculiar to mathematics through a far more thorough study of arithmetic to the exclusion of algebra and geometry.^^ In short, the apparent but partial remedy of concentration through specialization is being seized upon without regard to its possible supplement or alternative — concentration through the selection .,. and equally systematic organization of material pre-eminent ^ in its direct usefulness to life in general.

The attempt at discipline through at least the elementary study of a variety of subjects as systematic wholes, with its consequent lack of concentration, would not, perhaps, have resulted so disastrously had it not ^j^^ against been made in a period of reaction against mechan- formal ical memorizing. Since habit is the first stage memorizing of discipline, failure to repeat ideas and activities check. again and again in the unvarying sequences necessary to the formation of fixed habits is the immediate cause of a forgetfulness, for which too large a number of sequences is but a condition. One of the most contradictory fallacies into which teachers have been led in the effort to develop self-activity is insistence upon an immediate self-activity which refuses to utilize even a temporary imitation, verbatim repetition, or mechanical prompting, which may be the most direct and effective means to a self-activity truly independent and persistent. On the other hand, immediate self-activity, apperception, and interest, temporarily called forth through the stimulus of an intelligent teacher, will leave behind them pleasant impressions rather than discipline if the potentially most useful of the new associations have not been made definite by drill and the old ones more firmly fixed in the specific relationships upon which their usefulness depends. Mechanical memorizing in unvarying relationships is as necessary to discipline and the independent exercise of rational activities as repetition in continually varying relationships is necessary to apperception and adequate knowledge.

A third reason for failure has been overconfidence in the disciplinary efficiency of the method peculiar to a particular Neglect of branch of knowledge, to the common and somepedagogical times arrogant exclusion of the pedagogical method a method through which it can be most economically and certainly mastered. For this an equally arrogant pedagogy has been in part responsible. Until general pedagogical principles are analyzed into specific propositions that clearly apply to the details involved in the teaching of every branch, and the problems revealed by such application are solved by scientific experimentation and research, the failure resulting from the attempt to teach too much and inadequate memory drill will be made all the more inevitable by ineffective methods of instruction. From the standpoint of the formal discipline claimed for the abstract subject, as distinct from the specific discipline more or less adequately given, the chief pedagogic lack is a study of the conditions favorable to general discipline.

The culminating blunder of ail, possible only to thinkers bhnded by the point of view just discussed, is the assumption that the more remote a branch of knowledge from life, the better the means which it affords for from everydiscipline. The assumption usually accompanies day life it that such subjects, through their remoteness, |f^^! *® *^°°" present greater difficulties and demand — and through their lack of connection with every-day distractions receive — greater concentration. Even granting this, it is necessary still further to assume that the resulting discipline once gained is so thorough that it can persist outside the school in the absence of the incidental and continual repetitions possible only to subject matters which are most closely related to life. With the specialist such study, though often specific and narrow, may constitute an exceptionally persistent discipline, because of the very fact that his specialty, remote from the every-day life of the mass, is connected with his own. In similar fashion, the specific discipline peculiar to any branch, a discipline which may never become formal or general, depends for its mere continuance upon the persistence with which its essential sequences and relationships are called to mind in the years that follow school life. In the case of students and pupils who are not specialists, with a discipline sought through too much subject matter, with inadequate memory drill in the absence of effective method, the conscious selection of relationships and sequences that do not occasionally recur in every-day life robs them of the last possibility of the continuance of habits which, if formed at all, have been bought too dear.

2. The Lessening Confidence in the Theory of Formal Discipline Itself

To this conspicuous failure of specific discipline, which could not but weaken confidence in the formal discipline to which it is a condition, and from which most educational 2 workers and students do not distinguish it, have been added serious doubts as to the theory of formal discipHne itself. Its first breakdown came v/hen the new psychology demonstrated that the human mind does not consist of faculties which can be trained into general usefulness. When the memory, the intellect, and the will were seen to be composites of specific activities and habits, formal discipline reduced itself to the operation of a habit in fields of knowledge and experience other than that in which it is acquired. As yet the mass of thinkers have been little influenced by tliis new viewpoint of the specialist. Although when once familiar with it they will be less impressed by the enumeration of particular activities in so-called disciplinary subjects, which ma.y or may not become habitual or may or may not be carried over, they as yet are more or less under the influence of the grandiloquent plea that the study of mathematics or the languages trains the human intellect, and, therefore, constitutes the most efficient preparation for life.

To expert students of education the results of experimental investigations made by Professors Thorndike, Bagley, and others, tentative though they are, have, on the whole, been a still more disturbing factor. The mere fact that a particular group of mathematically trained individuals compared unfavorably in exact judgments with a group which had not been mathematically trained, or that the habitual proportion of neat papers in arithmetic did not result in neat papers in other school subjects, is perhaps no more convincing than a statistical investigation which shows that a larger proportion of graduates of the old classical course at a certain college have been successful in life than of those trained in the various parallel courses included in the modern curriculum. But the champions of formal discipline have been placed on the / defensive, and the great majority of educational thinkers / who are at present dominating educational theory and influ- ^- encing educational practice have at least gone so far as to say, *'You may learn to swim by learning to walk, but why not learn to swim by learning to swim?"

3. The Constantly Increasing Strength of the Organized Demand for Direct Preparation for Life