Educational aims and educational values

Preface

This book is written for laymen who are interested in Education, as well as for professional students and teachers. It consists of a series of essays on contemporary educational problems. In the first five chapters the attempt is made to formulate the aims of elementary and secondary education, and to describe the scope and methods of an education that meets the demands of modern life, both in its provisions for the development of the individual and in its training for social service. The remaining chapters deal with the professional training of the college-bred teacher, and with the services of John Amos Comenius who, in the seventeenth century, advocated nineteenth-century educational reforms.

Though written at different times, and delivered as lectures or addresses to various audiences of teachers and laymen, and subsequently printed as independent articles, these chapters really constitute — and this is especially true of the first five chapters — a progressive attempt to accomplish a single, somewhat comprehensive, purpose ; namely, to disentangle from the contemporary educational confusion, in both theory and

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PREFACE practice, our educational aims^ and to examine these aims in the light of present and future needs.

The reader will therefore find that there are occasional repetitions ; but he will also find, I think, that these repetitions are essential to the full discussion of the particular point then under consideration; they are not repetitions pure and simple.

The first, third, fifth, and eighth chapters have been printed, in nearly their present form, in the Educational Review; and the second, fourth, and sixth have similarly appeared in the School Review.

PAUL H. HANUS.

Harvard University, May, 1899.

The Study of Education at Harvard University . 165