Were you ever a child

Preface

When a fire-torn structure is about to fall in ruins, and some one says to the crowd, ** Look! that crack in the wall is getting wider! The beams on this side are all burned away, and it will fall in a minute. Stand clear!" — his remarks might perhaps be termed a criticism of an old institution. And similarly, when some one says, *' Get off the track! That's the new fast mail tooting down there, just around the bend! She goes ninety miles an hour and doesn't stop till she gets to New York! '' — it is in a sense a plea in behalf of a new movement. In that sense, the following pages are a criticism of the existing school system, and a plea for the New Education.

The situation is in appearance less dramatic than that, but the danger is quite as real. Education is changing so rapidly, its familiar aspects are crumbling so swiftly and the new methods are arriving upon the scene so fast, that a large part of the adult public runs the risk of being

Preface

intellectually knocked down and run over or left smothered among the ruins.

If we want to understand what is about to happen — what is already happening — we must be prepared to discard our most cherished preconceptions on the subject, and look at it anew in the light of modern science — in the light of the most recent discoveries in economics, anthropology and psychology. We must be ready to face the most startling restatement of its purposes, the most ruthless revaluation of its methods.

This book is a brief resume of the situation in the light of these discoveries. It attempts to show how the present school system became what it is, and why it is now in the throes of revolutionary change. It analyses the current conceptions upon which the existing system is based, and shows why these conceptions are inadequate to sustain the burden which education is called upon by twentieth century civilization to bear. It centres attention upon the two things which constitute, in their juxtaposition, the essential problems of education — namely, the nature of modern life and the nature of the child.

For the sake of this emphasis, and in order to make unmistakable the real and terrific problem involved, the method of exposition here chosen

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has been one which challenges at the outset the chief prejudices entertained by the adult public on the subject — including the notion that education should be written about in a heavy, unintelligible and soporific manner. The mordant seriousness of these pages may be mistaken for flippancy; the total program of the new education, as thus set forth, may be regarded by some readers as a piece of scurrilous mischief: but the point at least will have been established, that the new education is something not comfortably identical with the old.

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